Hermitage unveils damaged Danae - the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, will begin displaying the restored Rembrandt painting on Oct 14, 1997 - Brief Article

The drawn out awaited but not quite triumphant get back to public view on Oct 14 of Rembrandt's Danae at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg marks the extreme point of a grueling effort to salvage individual of the museum's most celebrated and sensuous masterpieces. An acid-and-knife attack 12 years ago transformed the reclining exposed into a "dark effervescing mass," in the words of single of the conservators who worked upon the painting. The newly restored work is the centerpiece of an 18-month-long exhibition, "Danae" The Fate of Rembrandt's Masterpiece," installed in sweep adjacent to the Hermitage's Rembrandt gallery. The display also includes Danae paintings by means of Titian and Blanchard, a of greece vase depicting the Danae myth, plus engraving, drawings and watercolors drawn from the Hermitage's collection. A 26-minute multimedia program will explore the painting's iconography, its art-historical connection the artist's methods, other Rembrandts in the Hermitage, and the restoration process; photographs of the restoration work will also be upon view.

Although the museum's upbeat pres release notes that "over 70 percent of the paint surface remained undamaged," distinguished Rembrandt scholar Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann more soberly observ in a new interview with A.i.A. that the ravaged areas are, in fact, "the greatest in quantity important parts of the painting: the face, material part and upper parts of the leg What was left -- the left upper quadrant -- has quite a destiny of surface but is not that important." Although he had not seen the rises of the restoration when interviewed, he conclud from the Hermitage's have a title to written report that the painting "obviously remains a ruin. There's no other way to describe it. They twitched together some passages that could be restored and the quiescence was left as is."

Reinforcing his view are make comments [i]or[/i] remarkss published by Tatyana Aleshina, who worked upon the restoration and contributed to the catalogue of the forthcoming exhibition. In a paper not awayed to a 1992 Rembrandt symposium in Stockholm, Aleshina asserted that the painting's "aesthetic quality has decreased substantially, on the contrary thanks to the efforts of the restorers, we have managed to avoid the total los of this great masterpiece." Her paper provided a fascinating glimpse at the pervasive intrusion of the Communist regime into flat the specialized realm of painting conservation: Soviet conduct and Communist Party officials, touched that the painting not become "a testimonial to barbarism," promptly ordered the museum's administrators "to minimize the amplitude of the picture's damage and to announce that Rembrandt's masterpiece would in a short time be back in the halls of the Hermitage. It was an undisguised unformed political order, absolutely unrealistic in the situation in question," declared Aleshina, who was secretary of a special commission of art historians and conservators appointed by dint of the Russian Ministry of tillage to oversee the restoration.

The painting's torturous trial-by-restoration included: and hour-and-a-half dousing in water immediately after the attack to neutralize the acid; sum of two units coatings with a mixture of sturgeon gelatine and honey "to reinforce the paint layers and stop the paint lifting from the canvas"; relining; in all senses to alcohol vapors to regenerate the varnish, which had make go rounded milky from the water; more than 70 trials on samples taken from the paint surface microscopic removal of more [i]or[/i] less but not all, encrustations of combined paint, varnish and clod that had been mixed together by means of the acid-water interaction; revarnishing.

"In order to restore the impression of an aesthetically without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw picture," some of the losse were then filled in with oil paint by the agency of Hermitage conservators, led by senior restorer Evgeni Gerassimov, according to the pres release. on the contrary parts of the body and drapery above the legs, where the damage was greatest in quantity severe, were not repainted, to avoid presenting passages that were more restorer than Rembrandt. (Rembrandt himself had substantially reworked Danae, changing her face from that of his deceased wife Saskia to that of Geertge Dircx about 10 years after he painted in in 1636)

Margaret Holben Ellis, chairman and professor of conservation at fresh York University's Institute of Fine Arts, opined that the operations used by the Hermitage conservators, although sometimes old-fashioned, were appropriate. "They did the best they could below the circumstances." She added that the proliferation of art attacks had alerted several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in novel York, to "have emergency carts around the galleries, containing equipment and supplies to help the security staff reply to fire, flood and vadalism."

After the exhibition, a government-appointed special commission of apts "will decide the future fate of Danae," which may be placed in storage on the contrary will probably be kept upon display, according to Lena Getmanskaya, a Hermitage spokesperson Meanwhile, the museum is beginning a two-year effort to place most of its paintings behind glass; "there has been to a great deal of vandalism," lamented Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovski.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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