Uncovering restoration secrets of Rubens's 'The Judgement of Paris' | National Gallery

It's a really interesting painting to work on. One of the things that we wanted to address with this treatment was the structural integrity of the panel. Obviously it's painted by Rubens but there is something in there that's actually not Rubens. There have been a lot of alterations to the painting in the past and we are now looking at how best to reintegrate the image with the better knowledge that we have now and all the imaging that we have and understanding of what's happened to the painting. My name is Brittany New. I'm one of the conservators here at the National Gallery and this is Rubens' Judgment of Paris. It's actually a really interesting painting to be working on. It's obviously painted by Rubens but there have been so many changes over the years. There are so many different things that we can look at when we're spending time with it. This is the Roman version of the Judgment of Paris. This is Paris here. It was prophesied at his birth that he was going to bring ruin to the city of Troy. He was a prince of Troy and so he was taken from his family and he was supposed to be killed but he was actually saved and brought up by some shepherds, hence his simple attire and the sheepdog down here. He was chosen by Mercury to come and judge this contest between the three goddesses that we see before us. The prize being the golden apple that Paris has in his hand. We've got Minerva here who is the goddess of wisdom and war and she's seen by her symbols, the owl, her weapons and the shield with the golden head Medusa on it. We have got Venus here who has the pearls and the flowers in her hair and obviously is recognised by her son Cupid in the corner down here. Then we've got Juno who is the queen of the gods and she is recognised by her symbol, the peacock here who is hissing at the sheepdog probably because she's not being chosen. Paris is actually offering the apple to Venus who has in turn offered him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world who was Helen of Sparta. Unfortunately in Paris then claiming his prize he has to abduct Helen of Sparta and that's what sparks the Trojan War in these myths and this is why we see the Fury Electo hovering in the sky above their heads as a sort of like ominous reminder of what's to happen in the story. So that's the story as we see it now but actually it's not quite how Rubens painted it. If you look really closely at the surface you can start seeing that there have been some changes to the paint film. So during the restoration process one of the things that we've been trying to look at is to really clarify what happened, when and by who. So we've spent a lot of time with colleagues in the scientific department looking at cross-sections and non-invasive imaging techniques and these all give us a snapshot of some of the changes that have happened to the painting and what we've found out from this is that there seem to be two specific campaigns of changes in the painting. Some by Rubens himself and some that appear to be over a layer of varnish that happened probably in the last quarter of the 17th century or the first quarter of the 18th century, most likely while it was actually in the collection of Richelieu because there are certain things we know about him that make us think that it's very likely that he would have tried to make this painting appear a little more modest. Some of the changes that Rubens made and we can see certainly in some of these imaging techniques that there were a pair of doves here, we can also see that there was a putty in the sky hovering above Venus's head and those have been painted out. One of the things that we can also see actually in the texture of the paint itself is that there have been changes to the drapery here across Venus's legs so we can see that there are drying cracks, there's a deep blue paint beneath the legs so the drapery actually used to come in front of the figure but Rubens then changed the figure so that the drapery was behind her. In the Museum of Fine Arts in Dresden there is a studio copy of the painting that shows actually a different scene from what we now see so it's almost certainly how the painting looked when it left Rubens' studio. In this particular story Paris had asked that in order to be able to judge the beauty of the goddesses he needed them to undress and so this is a moment when Mercury is demanding that they take their clothes off and there are various putti around that are sort of like helping them. So Cupid is pulling off Venus's robe and there's another putti that is pulling Minerva's undergarments off which are then being folded by the putti that has now turned into Cupid in fact in the corner there. Another one of the alterations was that there were satyrs up in the trees here concealed in the trees lustfully looking at the scene watching the goddesses as they undressed and the men demanding that the women undress. The satyrs overlooking the scene would have made it a much more sort of erotic and voyeuristic painting than how it now appears so it's still a very sort of sensual painting but it's changed from having those sort of very carnal connotations into something perhaps a little bit more modest which is probably why those changes were made in the first place. If you look really closely at the surface you can start seeing that there have been some changes to the paint film so here there's a pentiment and we can see that actually Paris's leg was originally outstretched here and we can see that his other foot actually was slightly further forward. We can also see here that there are some toes almost a disembodied legs appearing and the bottom of a quiver of arrows so this is actually where Cupid was originally painted. We also have here a very ghostly hand that's tugging at the undergarments of Minerva trying to disrobe her. There are a lot of very subtle changes. Here we can see that the drapery has been slightly changed so Paris's arm actually used to come down here and it was resting in his lap and we can see in the texture of the Now that's really interesting because it means that the moment of the story has actually been changed so instead of Paris having already decided that Venus has won the contest he's still pondering who he should choose. It's a different moment. If we start by looking at the construction of the panel actually the panel has been enlarged which is actually not something unusual for Rubens at all. He had panel makers that would expand his panels the same with canvases so the original panel which ended about here and here is actually made up from five boards that have been joined horizontally with little dowels in between the boards. He then chose to expand the panel a little bit. We're not absolutely sure why. I think everything generally in the composition does does fit within that slightly smaller space apart from this putty who is now Cupid down here but we can see from the x-radiograph and from the infrared that actually his position has changed so that could be something that Rubens modified at the moment that he made this expansion. This is made up of five boards. There's a piece down the side here that's made up of six pieces also of oak, the same type of wood, that have been joined together and then they have been half lapped onto the original panel. It would have to have that sort of join because it needed to be strong enough to withstand a sort of like an end grain butt join. So this has been half lapped onto the side and then another piece has been put across the whole length that would have then supported this join on the right hand side as well. We know that this adjustment in dimensions was made as part of the painting process, part of the original creation because we can see that the gesso that has been laid over the panel here actually overlaps onto the original boards so we know that this was all done as part of the original scheme by Rubens himself. It's quite interesting that the grain of the timber that he's chosen is all in the same direction. Some of his earlier panels have got different boards that are actually lying perpendicular to the original grain and that causes real problems as the panels age because they start moving differently and cause splits and problems and we can see how his understanding of how his works aged made a difference in how his panels were constructed and this is definitely one of his later works. This painting actually follows a very similar provenance as the painting The Village Fate which is in the Louvre now which we know to have been thinned and cradled in 1770 by a celebrated French restorer Jean-Louis Arcoin and he actually developed the adjustable cradle which is this type of cradle here. Previously cradles that were applied to the back of the paintings as reinforcements were fixed lattice works. These actually have sliding members that allow the painting still to move across the grain and that was quite a big development in terms of panel conservation at the time. This type of cradle actually is very unlike the ones that we see in the UK. This painting was in the UK by 1792 I think so we think it's more than likely that this is actually a French cradle that could have been worked on at the same time as the Louvre painting by Arcoin or one of his colleagues using this type of cradle. The panel is actually in really good condition for something that was thinned and cradled about 200 years ago there's nothing really that would have required a whole scale thinning and cradling treatment so we think this is actually more than likely to have been put on almost as a preventive measure to keep the panel flat make sure it could still move and we're happy that actually there's no damage to the paint film now there's no flaking or lifting however there is a little bit of washboarding that's and that has meant that some of the sliding members have jammed and so what we have done is actually make sure that the cradle is still functional make sure that those have released and can still move and we've done that by thinning these sliding cradle members and pushing them out and then we've replaced them with pairs of cradle members here you can see that there's two pieces and the reason we've done that this is one of the original cradle members which you can see is quite stiff so it didn't really allow for the washboarding or the movement we've replaced it with a pair of cradle members which you can see has much more flexibility so although it still supports the panel in the vertical direction it does allow a little bit more movement and keeps the cradle functional so there have been three conservation treatments to this painting and since it's been in our collection when it was acquired in 1844 it was cleaned and restored as part of that acquisition process and then almost 100 years later in 1941 it was cleaned by William Addison Holder and subsequently 10 years later actually there was some re-restoration done by Helmut Ruhmann so again we're sort of now another 80 or so years on and we're trying to readdress some of those restorations that we feel we can look at now with the information that we have and all the imaging that we have an understanding of what's happened to this painting and improve on some of those restorations they didn't have the luxury of the imaging and processes that we have now and clearly Holder understood that some of the paint on the surface was not Rubens began cleaning the painting removing some of these late 17th early 18th century alterations so things like this foot have become much more visible and this and the legs of Cupid again have become much more visible and now what we've done in our restoration treatment actually in our cleaning we have we've taken the painting back to the point that Holder cleaned it to because his restorations were beginning to discolour the varnish had become much more yellow the three-dimensional qualities were beginning to be lost we'd the darks had become much much lighter and a lot of the the lights and the highlights had become darker and more yellowed so now that we're beginning the restoration stage we still have some decisions to be made with the about what parts of the image we want to allow to remain visible what we might want to suppress a little we certainly could never ethically have taken the painting back to when it left Ruben's studio there's too much history so we do feel that with the information the new information that we have from our imaging and the better understanding of the painting that we're in a much better position now to reintegrate this image to tell the story as it is now while still allowing some of the history of the picture to be visible