Restorers or Vandals?

__"Restoration Drama" by Daniel Zalewski, in Lingua Franca (Feb. 1998), 22 W. 38th St., New York, N.Y. 10018.__

The cleaning of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes—a $4.5 million, 14-year project completed in 1994—has been hailed by most Renaissance scholars as a revelation, notes Zalewski, a senior editor of Lingua Franca. Stripped of dirt, wax, and glue deposited over five centuries, the once somber-seeming frescoes now look "positively vivacious." Instead of the "sculptural" painter, more concerned with modeling of figures than with coloring, that he was long taken to be, Michelangelo now appears to these scholars as "a vanguard colorist" who boldly juxtaposed pure, flat pigments, in experiments that "laid the groundwork" for the Mannerists to come.

Nonsense, scoffs James Beck, a Columbia University art historian. He maintains, reports Zalewski, that this "new Mannerist Michelangelo is less the product of careful cleaning than of the 20th-century imagination," that "the restorers inadvertently stripped a layer of shadows from the Sistine frescoes—a layer that Michelangelo himself had added in order to give his figures a chiaroscuro effect and unify and dampen the fresco tones."

Though Beck failed in his effort to halt the restoration of the Sistine Chapel, six years ago he founded ArtWatch International, a watchdog group that now has 600 members and chapters in New York, London, and Florence. The group’s aim, Beck says, is to "stop foolish attempts to improve masterpieces with unnecessary, pseudoscientific cleanings."

There is no doubt that restorers have done damage in the past. During the 1960s and ’70s, a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art told Zalewski, the Met applied a new synthetic varnish to several old-master works. "The idea," said the curator, who refused to identify the works involved, "was that the synthetic varnish wouldn’t yellow because it lacked organic material. Well, it didn’t. It turned gray. And we’ve since discovered . . . that removal is, if not impossible, extremely difficult."

Great advances in cleaning and conservation methods have been made in recent decades, Zalewski notes. "The techniques used today," asserts an adviser to London’s National Gallery, "are as microsurgery is to the methods of the old barber-surgeons." Beck remains, to say the least, unconvinced. Museums, in his view, are inclined to make "invasive cleanings, using newfangled solvents," often on artworks that are "very well preserved." Some of the conservation work, he claims, amounts to "vandalism, even if well intentioned." Horrified by the recent cleanings of Raphael’s Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi (1518–19) and Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Beck and ArtWatch are currently trying to prevent the museum from restoring Verrocchio’s Baptism (circa 1474–75).

"Cleaning controversies are nearly as old as museums," notes Zalewski. "The Louvre’s policies were assailed on the day of its public opening, in 1793." Later, French painter Edgar Degas successfully fought the Paris museum’s attempts to clean the Mona Lisa. Said Degas: "Pictures should not be restored. . . . Anybody who touches one should be deported."

Most restorations, Zalewski observes, "aren’t salvage operations for crumbling canvases: Typically, the biggest problem with an old-master painting is dirt and a dulled varnish." In such cases, Beck’s recommended solution is to live with the dirt, "because a hands-off policy is the safer route." But in the art world today, that is very much a minority view.