A Mysterious Cézanne Portrait Was Hiding Under the Layers of a Still Life | Hacker News Reader

A Mysterious Cézanne Portrait Was Hiding Under the Layers of a Still Life

atlasobscura.com

37 pointsVigier15 comments

I think Dali intuition about the Angelus by Millet is more interesting [1].

[1] https://theo.kuleuven.be/apps/press/theologyresearchnews/202...

Every. Artist. Recycles. Canvases.

There's no mystery here, museums push out stories like this on about a monthly basis as part of their marketing outreach, knowing that they will get hyped by news outlets that need a steady supply of content. This isn't news, it's news product, aka infotainment.

I think the mystery is who the portrait is of, though the entire story is the pointless PR you're mentioning.

I think Cézanne's best works being of his older age + loss of early artwork make this an interesting find

He is one to have made their model sit for 150 days and not be content with the piece he produced

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/20/late-bloomers-...

A lot of old canvases were reused like this. There's even a hidden treasure map under the Declaration of Independence that's only visible if you look at it from a special angle under a black light.

> The Declaration was carefully examined by staff when the document was re-encased in 2001, and no secret treasure map was discovered. "No, that's a Hollywood myth," Kratz said. "There is no treasure map on the back of the Declaration.

Actually, there was a treasure map...but General Washington had to dig up the treasure in early February 1778, so that he could meet payroll and make at least "good will" payments on overdue A/R for his Continental Army.

Excuse me, but the highly acclaimed documentary National Treasure says otherwise.

Interestingly, there were multiple copies of the Declaration of Independence that were printed and distributed. The one that everyone focuses on is just the copy that the delegates signed.

Even more interesting is that people keep looking at the document itself when the hidden treasure map is under the Declaration of Independence.

This is a true story - when I took my son to the National Archives in 2020 right before the pandemic, the security guard sent my son on a treasure hunt in the rotunda holding all the founding documents. He found all but one of the treasures ;)

Ugh. If they can remove the top layer, why can't they also remove the wood frame?

No, they did not remove the top layer. The procedure could be damaging and so is any attempt at removing the frame. Not saying it's not possible but is it worth it? Would it add value or substract from it? X-raying to see what's underneath is nifty but that's about it. On the outside there is a finished painting, why destroy it?

I meant digitally. I assumed they did some kind of 3D MRI type scan. If you do that, you can easily pull off upper AND lower layers.

I'm not sure how an x-ray can make paint #1 appear but paint #2 invisible - so I guess I'm missing something.

They didn't make any layer disappear. They're all there together.

Although you do bring up an interesting idea, you could remove the top layer by subtracting the visible portion from the xray.

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