‘Madonna and Child’: A Miracle at the Getty

No one knows how many artworks have been damaged or lost in Central and Eastern Europe during the turmoil in the last few years, but estimates run into the thousands.

At least one tale has a happy ending, however, as we see in “Innocent Bystander,” a didactic exhibition that is attracting crowds at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The captivating show (to Feb. 23) details the restoration of Orazio Gentileschi’s 1609 painting “Madonna and Child,” which had a hole blown out of it during a December, 1989, attempt to overthrow Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu.

When gunfire hit the National Palace in Bucharest, bullets and shrapnel ripped through walls of the Romanian National Museum of Art, located in a wing of the palace. Thirty paintings were destroyed and 130 were damaged during the battle and an ensuing conflagration. The Gentileschi, one of the museum’s most valuable possessions, was among the casualties.

The masterful painting--which depicts an Italian mother nursing a baby--had a gaping cavity from its center to the bottom of the canvas. Gunfire had penetrated a wall behind the painting, hit the stretcher bars and pushed a crossbeam through the canvas. One missing piece of the painting was later found in a corner across the gallery, but the remaining bits had scattered and burned, leaving a 5 1/2 x 14-inch gash across the mother’s forearm and the baby’s chubby legs.

“Madonna and Child” might have been relegated to the scrap heap of war, but--at the request of a Romanian cultural delegation--the J. Paul Getty Museum’s conservation laboratory accepted the task of repairing the Gentileschi, along with three less valuable Italian paintings that were damaged during the fray. Part of the arrangement was that Romanian conservator Simona Predescu would accompany the paintings and help with their restoration, and that the Gentileschi would be exhibited at the Getty before returning to Bucharest.

Now, about 14 months after the four mutilated survivors arrived in Malibu, the repaired “Madonna and Child” stands on an easel in a small second-floor gallery, surrounded by explanatory wall panels and vitrines of sample canvases that demonstrate the conservation process, largely executed by Elisabeth Mention, an associate conservator at the Getty.

Apparently made for Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, the painting marks a period when Italian artists humanized religious themes by depicting ordinary people instead of idealized subjects. Gentileschi--whose daughter, Artemesia, has recently become a more famous painter than he--was influenced by Caravaggio and worked in Rome, Genoa, Paris and London.

“Elisabeth did a wonderful job,” Getty paintings conservator Andrea Rothe said, casting an admiring glance at the glowing painting. “You can tell it has been repaired, but the point is to be able to see the work as a whole.”

Experts such as Rothe may determine at a glance where the painting has been patched and repainted, but most visitors are hard pressed to discover any flaw in the painting’s image or surface without consulting photographs of the damage. Indeed, “Madonna and Child” appears to have been resurrected by some miracle, but its near-pristine condition is the result of painstaking work and a measure of trial and error.

“The painting presented two major challenges,” Mention said. “The first was structural. We had to reconstruct an old canvas that had been built up with layers of paint.” As the exhibition explains, a painting’s structure is typically composed of four layers: canvas, sizing (a glue-like sealer), gesso (a mixture of glue and gypsum or chalk, applied to create a smooth surface) and paint.

“We could attach a new piece of sized canvas and gesso it, but we had a problem with texture,” Mention said, noting that it was impossible to find a fabric that exactly matched the old canvas. “I knew that no matter how good my inpainting was, it would stick out like a sore thumb if the texture wasn’t right.”

She tried various conventional methods that conservators use to replicate texture, including painting “threads” of pigment to replicate a woven pattern, but nothing worked. Finally, a technique that Rothe had used several years ago while restoring an altarpiece in San Sepolcro, Italy, provided the answer.

In that restoration, Rothe had made a silicon mold of the altarpiece’s fabric and cast a film of polyvinyl acetate that could be attached to a patch of new fabric. When he came to the Getty he brought a small sample of the film, but he didn’t have the formula. His colleagues at the Getty tried to duplicate the method, but they had no luck. “It was either too brittle or it collapsed. We couldn’t get the proportions right,” he said.

Mention eventually determined to try again, gradually changing the proportion of ingredients (polyvinyl acetate emulsion, gesso, dry pigment and water) until she hit upon the right combination. Then she made a silicon rubber mold of the painted canvas’ surface, which picked up every hair and nuance of the texture, and spread the troublesome liquid on the mold. When dry, the film was peeled off, cut to fit the ragged hole and attached to the patch of new canvas.

“It was amazing that it worked,” Mention said, noting that her newfound knowledge will be useful in the future.

With the surface intact, she tackled the second challenge, pictorial restoration. “A loss of that magnitude is not at all common,” she said of the hole in the painting. “We would never dream of reconstituting it unless we knew what it looked like. But fortunately we had a photograph from the museum’s catalogue that we could project onto the canvas.”

One of the keywords of modern conservation is reversibility. All additions to a damaged work are done so that they can be removed if necessary. Conservators never use the same materials as the artist so that their work will not be confused with the original workmanship. In this case, Mention drew the forms with a light colored pencil and used water-base materials to replicate the look of the aged oil painting.

“This project was challenging from all aspects, but it was very rewarding,” Mention said. She and her colleagues made several discoveries as the work progressed. A dark shadow that Gentileschi had painted around one breast was revealed when they cleaned the painting and removed the discolored work of a 19th-Century restorer.

Most exciting, Mention said, was her discovery of the artist’s signature and date under a lining that was added in the 19th Century. The painting had always been attributed to Gentileschi, but the date had often been questioned. When she saw the words, “Horatius Gentileschi faciebat 1609” (Orazio Gentileschi made this 1609) written on the back of the canvas, those questions disappeared.

“This was big news,” she said.