Vermeer Restoration Reveals a Painting Within a Painting

The BBC has a show called The Repair Shop, where people submit their old wares and heirlooms to be restored by specialist artisans. In most episodes there are paintings involved, and the first thing the specialist restorer does is to strip away layers of old varnish. The results are typically spectacular: colours become vibrant again, right off the bat, completely changing the mood of the composition.

I’m sure there is a Louvre team dedicated to maintaining Mona Lisa so this will sound like an idiot request, but: maybe it’s time to do something like that for the old girl…?

There’s also one by another Leo protege where she’s topless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa_replicas_and_reinter...

nah, it's clunky and unnecessary.

I dont get what the point of restoring it in this way, unless you are 100% convinced that this was vermeer's final intent. i.e. yes, it might have been his initial intent, but he painted over it for a reason. who are we to destroy his final intent by revealing something else? If, this was a different story, that religious fanatics painted over cupid, not vermeer himself, then yes, there's value to "restoring" it to its originality. But that doesn't seem to the be the case here.

The explanation is right there in the article, and it does not involve your supposed modern day hubris:

Restorers found that the central panel of the artwork, known as the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, had been painted over in the 16th Century.

Another artist had altered the Lamb of God, a symbol for Jesus depicted at the centre of the panel.

Now conservationists have stripped away the overpaint, revealing the lamb's "intense gaze" and "large frontal eyes".

Calling it a "restoration" is an insult to professionals who have spent years working on the painting.

Any changes to the painting (there are indeed more than just the lamb) were actually painted over during the 16th century. What you see now is the original and what you think is the original is actually a 16th century cover up.

Look again at the pre-restoration lamb. You can actually see the original ear on the right (viewer left) side of the lamb's head through the cover-up.

More obvious in this picture: https://twitter.com/frajds/status/1219125000550199301

It looks like the aspect ratio is different. Top and bottom is further apart in the one image than in the other.

Highly recommended.

I still have to visit this new Vermeer restauration, probably today.

Whats interesting about this entire theory is that so many people involved in the art world have a vested interest in disproving/disparaging the idea. The closer art gets to paint by numbers, or an otherwise mechanical process, like a very large set of pixels, the less impressive, and therefore less valuable the art becomes. And who wants that?

But Tim's Vermeer makes extremely some compelling arguments about how certain features present in The Music Lesson would be impossible to recreate by eyesight alone, yet were trivial using the optical device.

Finally, if the painting is photorealistic, and the actual room was arranged like it is in the painting, isn't composition at least partially a property of the room itself?

Any technique, Tech you could say, is just a tool. In the right hands you can be a master. In the wrong hands any tool, no matter how amazing, will be disastrous.

Also as someone who photographed his whole live and worked as a DOP on film sets: even if you were a master at painting off a camera obscura what makes pictures work is not in the fingers, it is in the eyes that place that camaera obscura, that interpret the resulting composition etc.

A camera obscura might help to give you physically accurate angles and contrasts, but nobody will tell you which camera positions, angles, focal lengths, light situations and motifs will produce a stunning image.

It is a old hat I know, but try giving a shitty camera to a professional and a professional camera to an amateuer and the professional will still get you the better pictures. This is because a professional has a image in their head and knows how to get there with thw tools available while the amateur either has no image in their head (in which case the result will be a bit arbitrary) or they don't know how to get there (in which case it will look like a budget version of some other popular thing).

There are of course truly amazing amateuers that developed their own unique style and technique and I love that — but they wouldn't aim to be masters at what they are doing.

> In light of the many indications

Such as? They are maddeningly vague about the details. They're not really telling us anything.

On the contrary, it was a masterpiece in creativity