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Home ABOUT US ARCHIVE LINKS MEMBERSHIP THE JOURNAL 6 January 2014 NEW YEAR REPORT Assaults on History: Dishing Donors; a Vatican Wobble; and, Reigniting an Old Battle of Hearts, Minds, Interests and Evidence We had a good and eventful campaigning year in 2013. At home, ArtWatch was invited to speak in the Scottish Parliament for the interests of art and against a municipal arts bureaucracy seeking to overturn a prodigiously generous benefactor’s wishes and instructions in order, effectively, to reward its own negligence with an extension of powers and a major capital project (without clear Above, Fig. 1: The now notoriously “restored” wall painting of costing). Our views on this proposal were carried in the Christ (Ecce Homo), seen here before (left and centre) and October Museums Journal, the December Apollo (see Burrell after (right) treatment. (See The “World’s worst restoration” and the Death of Authenticity, and The Battle of Borja: Cecilia pdf) and in the Sunday Times (Scotland). We found ourselves Giménez, Restoration Monkeys, Paediatricians, Titian and in the midst of a high-level museum world schism. Great Women Conservators.) The fame of the incident led to a great increase of visitors to the parish church in Borja, Spain. The church imposed an entrance charge. At the end of December the parish priest was arrested for what the Daily MacGregor versus Penny Telegraph reports as “suspicion of misappropriating funds [£174,000], of money laundering and sexual abuse”. Speaking for the overturning of Sir William Burrell’s terms of bequest was the Glaswegian director of the British Museum and former director of the National Gallery, Neil MacGregor. Mr MacGregor had agreed (presumably with the blessing of his trustees) to be co-opted as an adviser and declared partisan onto a Glasgow Life body – “Burrell Renaissance”. In support of Glasgow Life’s ambitions, MacGregor expressed with characteristic (lawerish) eloquence impatience with the length of time in which The Living might find themselves governed by the Wishes of the Dead. The present director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny (a scholar, rather than a populariser of others’ scholarship) spoke no less eloquently in opposition: “What is very often forgotten in discussions of this kind is the moral Above, Fig. 2: The Daily Telegraph’s report of 23 October 2013 on the Chinese Government-approved, £100,000 advantage and tangible benefit of a declared preference for restoration during which a Qing dynasty temple fresco was honouring the wishes of the donor. Real concern for the entirely obliterated by luridly colourised repainting. This crime against art and heritage came to light when a student posted future is always more persuasive in those who have a comparative photographs online. In the resulting furore, a genuine feeling for the past.” government official from the city responsible for the temple described the restoration as “an unauthorised project”. Parliamentary Concerns The matter will come before the Scottish Parliament this month. Intriguingly, one of the members of the parliamentary committee that scrutinised the Burrell Lending request from Glasgow Life, Gordon MacDonald, SNP MSP, told yesterday’s Sunday Times (Scotland) that: “I too was concerned at the cost of £45m bearing in mind that Kelvingrove refurbishment cost £29m and they raised £2.5m from sponsorship and donations. The major work at the Burrell is a complete new roof and removal of lecture theatre to create new gallery space. Both of which will be costly, but £45m?” Fresh Crimes Against Art and History Generated with www.html-to-pdf.net Page 1 / 9 Internationally, two recent horrifically destructive mural restorations (the first in Spain and another in China, see Figs. 1 to 4) had reminded many of the great Sistine Chapel cleaning controversies of the 1980s and early 1990s (see “Restoration tragedies”). In January 2013 we were drawn back into that monumental Sistine Chapel restoration controversy (which had triggered ArtWatch’s founding in 1992) by an official acknowledgement that Michelangelo’s stripped-down ceiling frescoes were prey to failures of environmental regulation that were being exacerbated by swelling visitor numbers. We had warned against such failures twenty years earlier: “Artificially induced changes in moisture, heat and patterns of air convection can themselves do gross damage…The most obvious risk is that external air-borne pollutants will be pulled in.” (“The Above, Figs. 3 and 4: The Telegraph reported that Wang Jinyu, Physical Condition of the Sistine Ceiling”, Chapter IV, p.122, an expert on fresco restoration from the Dunhuang Academy, had said the intervention could not be called “restoration, or Art Restoration ~ The Culture, the Business and the Scandal, [even] destructive restoration” because “[It is] the destruction London, 1993.) of cultural relics since the original relics no longer exist”. It was noted that the case had echoes of a headline-grabbing incident last year when an elderly parishioner performed “a An Old Crime Implodes disastrous restoration” on a 19th century fresco of Christ in the Spanish town of Borja. One Chinese website user wrote. At the beginning of last year, Antonio Paolucci, the director “They have turned a classic painting into graffiti. It looks like something out of Disneyland, doesn’t it?” of the Vatican Museums, insisted that whatever the problems, visitor numbers could not be restricted: “We have entered the era of large-scale tourism, and millions want to enjoy our historical culture. Limiting numbers is unthinkable.” Today, the unthinkable may be on the cards. Paolucci acknowledges in this month’s Art Newspaper that the huge increases in visitor numbers (5,459,000 last year from 4m the year before) constitute his biggest practical problem: “…The sheer numbers can be damaging, especially in the Sistine Chapel, which everyone wants to see. At the height of the season it gets 20,000 to 25,000 people a day, all breathing out carbon dioxide and vapour and bringing in dust. We are employing Carrier, a top US firm [who donated and installed the presently failing system] to work out a method of dealing with humidity; otherwise we will have to limit numbers…” (Emphasis added.) On January 2nd Paolucci expressed further concerns in a Vatican museums press release: “I’m asking myself what will Above, Fig. 5: Above: Michelangelo’s prophet Daniel from the happen during the coming Easter holidays and the great Sistine Chapel Ceiling, before (left) and after (right) cleaning. The great brightening of colours, simplifications and canonization of Popes John XXIII and John Paul II. This will flattening of design, and destruction of shading and modelling bring to Rome an immense mass of Catholics from every that occurred during restoration led many to complain of the “Disneyfication” of Michelangelo’s work. Note particularly here part of the world. Such extraordinary numbers oblige one to the loss of folds on the drapery over the shoulder to the left, make some fundamental and priority considerations. The and the loss of the previous dark shadow to the right of that drapery. Supporters of the restoration defended such objective must be from now on to observe constant alterations on the grounds that Michelangelo had originally maintenance and preventive conservation of the Heritage. painted over-brightly and without chiaroscuro in order that his images would “read” through the gloom of a smokey, To do so we must provide ever more important resources.” candle-lit chapel. Today, despite the creation of a hugely At the same time, Paolucci promised that, after 3 years of increased chromaticism during the restoration, the Vatican work, all will be ready in May for the “improved air authorites are contending that there needs to be a ten-fold increase in the (artificial) lighting of the ceiling because the conditioning, reduction of pollutants and humidity control of present lighting creates a “low-contrast twilight that fails to the temperature.” bring out the colours in Michelangelo’s masterpiece”. Have the colours faded to a tenth of their previous intensity over the last twenty years? Antonio Paolucci, a distinguished Renaissance art scholar (and student of Roberto Longhi), might be thought to be in an impossible position as director of the Vatican’s museums. Presently, Michelangelo’s frescoes are being devoured by pollution and condensation that are the inescapable by-products of permitting the Sistine Chapel to serve as a tourism cash cow. At the time of the last restoration of the ceiling, the Vatican’s finances were a source of scandal (one of its bankers had been found hanged on a bridge in London). On December 7/8 last year the Financial Times reported “The Vatican bank was established to serve the work of the Catholic Church around the world. It has now become synonymous with financial scandal. An 11-month FT investigation reveals the extent of mismanagement at the Euros 5bn-asset bank and the murkiness of its operations that finally led regulators, international agencies, big banks and even Pope Francis himself to take action.” (Rachel Sanderson, “The Scandal at God’s Bank”.) In this climate, is cutting back visitors really an option? For that matter, is the new air-conditioning system Above, Fig. 6: A greyscale version of Fig. 5. The contention promised for May capable of coping with yet further that Michelangelo’s work needs ever-more artificial increases of visitors of the kind indicated by Paolucci? illumination is ironic – and, in truth, confessional. When his painting was originally unveiled in 1512, observers were stunned not by any brilliance of colouring (no one mentioned In the absence of dramatic reductions of visitor numbers his colouring) but by the fact that the artist had given such (which must presently be netting in excess of £75m p.a.) it great emphasis to light and shade, and to “sculptural” modelling in between his great tonal contrasts, that his figures is hard to see how any amount of conservation tinkering appeared real, not painted, and that they seemed to be might resolve the present crisis.