Andrea della Robbia Injured in Fall

Can you imagine how it would feel to arrive at work one sunny summer morning to find a prized 15thC work of art – an Andrea della Robbia glazed terracotta relief sculpture – lying in pieces on the floor?

"Heartsick" I think would be the word for it.

Sadly, that happened this morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Apparently, the metal mounts that held 62-x-32-inch relief on the wall over a doorway gave out sometime during the night. The wood-framed lunette, Saint Michael the Archangel, fell to the stone floor below, crashing into pieces.

Della Robbia’s blue-and-white lunette of Saint Michael, dressed in armor and holding a sword and the scales of justice, was commissioned c. 1475 for the church of San Michele Arcangelo in Faenza, a small town between Bologna and Ravenna. The church was dismantled around 1798, and the Saint Michael ended up in private hands. It was acquired at auction by the Metropolitan Museum in 1960.

Curators and conservators were at work this morning assessing the situation. Their preliminary inspection indicates that the relief was not irreparably damaged, that it can be repaired and again put on display. The European Paintings and Decorative Arts Galleries will be temporarily closed, until the sculpture is transferred to the conservation area of the Museum for a full assessment of the damage.

What constitutes a “Major” museum?

What constitutes a “Major” museum? This announcement from artdialy.org gives us one way of looking at it:

Philippe de Montebello – the eighth and longest-serving Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York – announced in January his plans to retire at the end of the year. To celebrate Mr. de Montebello’s long stint as Director, the curators of the Museum announced plans today for an exhibition of approximately 300 of the more than 84,000 works of art acquired during his 31-year tenure. The project will be a collaboration of the curators currently working in the Museum’s 17 curatorial departments.

The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions will be on view in The Tisch Galleries from October 24, 2008, through February 1, 2009. With so much to choose from, the 300 selected items promise to be significant. It's on my calendar.

Perhaps Nothing Is Meant To Last Forever

I suppose I’ve never actually thought about it until now, but I think I’ve been fooled into a subconscious assumption that modern science and civilized conscience can indefinitely protect whatever fragments of ancient life remain to us. But learning of yet another World Heritage Site in peril makes me realize that “indefinitely” is an unrealistically long time.

It’s been known since 2006 that melanin, a black pigment produced by a bacteria, has been staining the walls and permanently affecting the 17,000 year old cave paintings of Lascaux, in France.

According to CultureGrrl, Lascaux's administrators have been implementing an aggressive treatment they call "decolorization" to remove the melanin by physically scraping the affected areas. The scraping not only removes the melanin but also layers of the walls' surface, whether painted or unpainted, thus irrevocably altering one of mankind's most famous works of art.

While French officials assert the cave is close to reaching a microbiological equilibrium, members of the International Committee for the Preservation of Lascaux strongly disagree. They claim that just the opposite is happening. They can't both be right. We can only hope that this is not a case in which the cure is worse than the disease.

An incalculable amount of human creativity has been eradicated by war, arrogance and simple unmindfulness – realities of the human condition. But there’s something particularly sad about the destruction resulting from misguided preservation efforts. Our documentary use of today’s photographic technologies may be some consolation for generations to come who at least will have some visual evidence of what’s been lost. But they may well be saddened by the fact that they have the technology that could save what we couldn’t.

Valuing Art

I'm afraid I just don't get why a 4000 year old clay tablet from the fabled Sumarian city of Ur is expected to sell for just £30,000-40,000 at auction, while Jeff Koons’ and Damien Hirst’s work sells for multi-millions of dollars. I'd never make it in the art valuation business!

The clay tablet, dated to 2046-2038 B.C., is listed at Bonhams as Lot 145. The columns of cuneiform text record the administration of domestic animals, and lists the manner in which the flocks were divided during the course of one year. Some were marked as being for government supplies, while others were destined to be supplies for the officially supported religious cults.

The tablet provides a remarkable insight into the daily life of this ancient civilisation and details the particular manner in which animals of one type are distinguished from others within their group. Sheep, for instance, are described as grass-fed or grain-fed, unplucked or plucked, which shows the importance placed upon specific features of the livestock.

News Flash: Oil painting NOT invented in 15th C Europe!

It’s been 7 years since the Taliban blew up two ancient colossal Buddha statues in the Afghan region of Bamiyan. What wasn’t widely reported at the time was that behind the statues were caves -- decorated with precious paintings from 5th to 9th century A.D. -- which also suffered damage.

According to ArtDaily Newsletter, the paintings are probably the work of artists who traveled on the Silk Road, the ancient trade route between China and the West, across Central Asia's desert.

Now a World Heritage site, thanks to UNESCO support for a conservation project, the Bamiyan paintings have recently become the source of a major discovery for art historians.

Painted in the mid-7th century A.D., the murals show scenes with Buddhas in vermilion robes sitting cross-legged amid palm leaves and mythical creatures. As a result of experiments performed at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), the scientists discovered that 12 out of the 50 caves were painted with oil painting technique, using perhaps walnut and poppy seed oils.

The Bamiyan cave murals predate by hundreds of years the first documented use of oil paint in Europe. Art history books have long proposed that oil painting was invented in 15th century Europe.

I was thinking about the Taliban’s destruction of the colossal Buddha statues at Bamiyan just a couple of weeks ago. It was hearing about the mind-bendingly oblivious Finnish tourist who broke off part of the ear of an Easter Island Maoi statue that got me thinking about the destruction of ancient art by humans.




There are nearly 900 moai on Easter Island, in various stages of construction, some of them more than 33ft tall and weighing more than 80 tons. The statues are believed to be up to 1,000 years old, representing Polynesian ancestors. Rapa Nui National Park, in which the moai are situated, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995.

My reaction to the Taliban’s desecration was utter shock … and disbelief that people can be so full of hatred. My reaction to the Finnish fool’s desecration was a flare-up of anger … and disbelief that a person can be so selfish and ignorant. Was he drunk? Showing off? Or was he just arrogant and self-centered? When the vandal broke the earlobe off, it fell to the ground and shattered into small pieces, which he then attempted to steal. His spokeswoman said, "He really didn't realize the magnitude of his actions. We all make mistakes in our lives, and this was his mistake." And what a whopper is was!

In the end … is there any difference between the politically-motivated destruction of antiquities and that inspired by individual stupidity? The damage is done.

The Return of Samson & Delilah

Not long after his return from Italy in 1608, Rubens was commissioned to paint a Samson and Delilah for Nicolaas Rockox. Rockox was a wealthy and influential Antwerp burgher who was a great friend to Rubens and who become one of his greatest patrons.

If you've listened to my Jane's Smart Art audio guide to Antwerp Cathedral, you know that Rockox had a hand in commissioning Rubens to paint the magnificent Arquebusiers' Guild altarpiece, The Descent From the Cross -- for which Rubens expressed his appreciation by including a portrait of his friend on one of the side panels.

And if you've seen the Descent, you'll recognize the old woman who here peers over Delilah's shoulder. Rubens often repeated certain figural types that he'd used successfully in previous works ... which was one way he was able to be so prolific.

Although we're not told how it came to pass, The Art Newspaper tells us that, from 1700 until 1880, the Samson and Delilah was in the collection of the Prince of Liechtenstein, and then was sold to the National Gallery, London. The "return" of the title refers to the loan of the painting to the now-closed exhibition in Rockoxhuis, Antwerp, as well as to its appearance at the Palais Liechtenstein where it is now being shown (through 25 May, 2008) along with other works collected by Rockox.

I'd say this is a "don't miss" opportunity if you find yourself anywhere near Vienna in the next three months.

"The Most Beautiful Drawing inthe World"

People generally don't think of Birmingham, Alabama as a destination city for art, but there's now a good reason for art afficionados to plan a visit this Fall:

The Birmingham Museum of Art has just announced that between September 28 and November 9, 2008 it will be host to one of the most significant collections of Leonardo da Vinci drawings. This will be the first time the Biblioteca Reale (Royal Library) in Turin, Italy has made the collection available, in its entirety, outside of Italy.

Among the most celebrated of the Turin sheets is the preparatory sketch of the angel for the first version of the Madonna of the Rocks (ca. 1483), originally intended for a chapel altarpiece in the church of San Francesco Grande in Milan. Its powerful and expressive silverpoint parallel hatching led art critic and connoisseur Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) to describe it as the “most beautiful drawing in the world.

The works date from about 1480 to 1510 -- the most fertile period of da Vinci's career --and demonstrate his acutely observant, imaginative, and intellectual faculties. The collection includes one of his most celebrated notebooks, the Codex on the Flight of Birds, and 11 important drawings, including anatomical studies and utilitarian working drawings; one sheet includes a fragment of a poem. They are executed in a variety of media, including chalks, metal point, and pen and ink—some on color-prepared paper.

Quite a coup for the Birmingham Museum, and worth a trip.

Going Beneath The Surface

X-ray technology is used in the art world to see beneath the surface of paintings, and under plaster on walls, to document the artist's process and to find lost works. This is done despite the fact that x-rays can damage the organic pigments ... I presume, because the learning is deemed to outweigh the risks.

According to the Discovery Channel, however, there’s a benign form of electromagnetic radiation that is beginning to be used in the art world. Most of us have never heard of T-rays (terahertz rays), although the technology has been in use by electrical engineers for decades. The new technique should be able to detect particular pigments in old artwork that other types of scans miss -- such as sanguine, a reddish-brown color that Flemish painters often used.

Right now T-ray images are only generated in black and white, but scientists are working on developing the technology to produce color images. From what I understand there are just two T-ray machines currently being used for scanning art, and only one of them is portable. Researchers at the University of Michigan are planning on using it to find murals hidden beneath layers of plaster in centuries-old churches in France.

I'd wager that we're going to be hearing alot more about T-ray scanning projects in coming years.

Might David Really Leave Florence?

If you’ve ever battled the tourist crowds in Florence, and stood in line waiting to get into the Accademia to see Michelangelo’s magnificent David, you’ll understand at least part of the proposal being made by Tuscany's cultural chief, Paolo Cocchi, to move the statue to a new location some distance outside of the city center. He argues that moving David would ease tourist congestion in the historic center of Florence, and says, ''Keeping him in a museum where hundreds of tourists have to line a 45-cm wide pavement doesn't seem the best place for him''.

Opposition to the idea came fast and furious.

The idea of taking David out of his newly improved setting at the Galleria dell'Accademia elicited a quick response from the head of the city's museums, Cristina Acidini, who cited the millions of euros the city recently spent cleaning the statue and installing sophisticated anti-pollution systems to protect it.

According to LifeinItaly.com, “Officials at the Accademia stressed it would be 'extremely risky' to move the masterpiece out of the building that has been its home since 1873, when it was removed from its original position in front of Palazzo Vecchio.

“‘The home of David must be in the centre of Florence, for historical reasons,’ said Accademia director Franca Falletti. Branding Cocchi's suggestion ‘absolutely out of the question,’ she recalled the statue's fragility. An eight-month restoration to get it ready for its 500th birthday in 2004 revealed structural frailty, especially in the ankles, and the continuing impact on its surface of the bad air and street dirt brought in by millions of tourists.

“In the light of these risks, some art experts even suggested the statue should be moved to the Accademia's cellar.”

Fortunately, a less radical solution was implemented. Instead of being removed from public view, the David was placed behind an insulating barrier of circulating air, whereby streams of air protect it against the dust and particles which could further corrode its delicate surface. Special carpeting traps dirt as visitors approach the sculpture.

Given the cultural, historical, and conservation issues that are being raised in opposition to Cocchi’s proposal, my guess is that people wanting to see David century from now will still inch along, single-file, on the same narrow sidewalk as they do today.

The Cardsharps

I wasn't able to upload this image on Dec 17th when I wrote about the discovery of Caravaggio's previously mis-attributed painting, an earlier version of The Kimbell's "The Cardsharps". Here it is.