I buy seven Tang bowls for $5 each. They have been properly aged. This is skill, another skill. I watch as a man dips a fat old brush in red clay slip and washes it over the basis of his olive green jars until it gathers and encrusts in the hot air into that crumbly just dug up way. A few shops down there is a haphazard pile of cups and jars – sixteenth-century porcelains from last week – over which a man is splashing an acid solution. It bites into the glaze and abrades it in a usefully random way. This level of authenticity – the grasses matted to the insides of my bowls, the cloacal dirt deep in the seams of these gorgeous celadons that I am coveting and wondering how to get home – is a fabulous flowering of how the market works. We can do authenticity if authenticity is what you want.1
∵
In his search for the origin of white porcelain, the artist Edmund de Waal (b. 1964) visits Jingdezhen in China, where one can buy imitations of seventh- century Tang porcelain encrusted with clay to mimic a crumbly dug up state, as well as ‘sixteenth-century’ porcelain ‘from last week’ abraded with acid to imitate old age (fig. 6.1). Ageing the porcelain answers to the demands of a market which craves a certain aura of authenticity. Hence the material state of these imitation Tang bowls, as defined some thirteen centuries ago and carefully reproduced, is manipulated to achieve an aged appearance. Yet, as De Waal recounts in The white road (2015, 68), ‘No one is here for aesthetics. They are here to make a living, walking skilfully along the pathway between reproduction and – what is the correct word – fraud? Fakes? Well neither of those. This could not be more complex in a country where copying is a valued pathway of respect, a way of learning “skills”’. Michael Taussig (1993, xiii) (1993) describes how ‘the wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that “power”’. In Jingdezhen, character and power is gauged not just from using the same material of Tang bowls – white porcelain – but also through the mimicked patina of the object’s long life, as seen in the ‘cloacal dirt deep in the seams of these gorgeous celadons’, or the imposed abraded effect apparently acquired through use and time. Although there was no doubt in De Waal’s mind that he was buying a modern reproduction, the aesthetic value of the imitated authentic state, including its traces of age and the impact on the viewer’s experience, cannot be denied. For such modern objects made for the trade, the fictive narrative of the object’s history or biography presented by a patina – dirt, dust, corrosion, abrasion, human impact – denotes age and origin. Material mimesis, and the mimetic methods used in art production, replication and conservation, can be approached in a variety of ways; the material mimesis involved is influenced by ever-changing concepts of authenticity, perception, expectations and evolving scientific methods, as well as transformations in taste, patterns of collecting and the commerce of the art world.
Porcelain production at Jingdhezen
Photo: John Warburton-Lee Photography / Alamy S tock Photo
When considering authentic artworks, we need to look at the objects’ material histories or biographies, as artefacts were appropriated and changed, stimulated by, for example, a new taste or fashion, the art market’s demands, a change of status, perhaps even political revolutions, or ever-advancing approaches to restoration. Some of these changes may be considered historical, belonging to the life of the artefact, and may thus become part of an authentic and sometimes material narrative. Others may be unintentional or actual falsifications, the latter possessing their own materials and contexts. In a radio discussion on authenticity in art, Xavier Bray, the chief curator of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, explains why he inserted a Chinese replica of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Young Woman, ordered on the internet and costing $120 (including postage), into an Old Masters exhibition (‘Start of the Week’, BBC Radio 4, 2015). When it arrived, Bray states, it looked rather fresh, and he was tempted to ‘put a bag of tea to it’. Placed next to the original, however, the differences are striking: there is no ‘soul’, Bray states. The project, the brainchild of the American artist Doug Fishbone, challenged the visitor to look closely at the paintings and then vote on which work in the exhibition was the fake. Only 300 out of 3000 who voted picked the fake Fragonard. The British artist Grayson Perry, speaking on the same programme, clarifies how craftsmen would have had the eye, hand and brain of the era they lived in, something which is impossible to replicate in a modern copy or version. Perry explains to the other interviewee in the programme, Patrick Mark, maker of a film on the history and revival of the famous Fabergé company, which today produces replicas of Fabergé’s original designs, that such replicas or versions – which in many cases use modern materials and methods to mimick the original matter – would look physically similar, but would lack the ‘spirit of the craftsman’.
The production of replicas or copies that mimic historical processes, skills and materials should be situated in the context and time in or for which these were made. Edmund de Waal describes how, in the case of the Tang bowls, their reproductions are not just commercial products in China. Rather, copying such historical objects is also a ‘valued pathway of respect, a way of learning skills’. Similarly, in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth century Italy, a copy after a Raphael painting was a highly-desired possession, with art historical documentary value, and an accepted inclusion in a comprehensive, high-quality art collection. However, a century later, in the changed context of eighteenth-century Europe, due to a new moral emphasis on originality and authorship, those esteemed copies were discarded, and, for example, sold off to art academies to serve as educational models for copying, both in painting and print, and thus for learning skills (Black et al. 2012). The Foulis Academy in Glasgow, established in 1753 by Robert Foulis, a printer and book dealer, is a case in point. Foulis travelled to Continental Europe to obtain works for his business, but also to buy paintings for the study collection of the Academy. He also had copies made by students for private clients. For example, in October 1767, the banker James Coutts paid £50 for a copy of the Duke of Hamilton’s monumental Rubens, Daniel in the lions’ den. Such copies were also shown in exhibitions (fig. 6.2), and used as training materials for students who made drawings, prints and paintings after them (fig. 6.3).2 Today, most of these paintings, often good-quality copies, live in storage rooms.
David Allan, the interior of the Foulis Academy of Fine Arts, Glasgow. Engraving, 23 cm × 29 cm
© National Galleries of Scotland , Mrs. Lydia Skinner Gift 2006
David Allan, exhibition of the Foulis Academy’s paintings in the inner court of the University of Glasgow. Engraving, 23.5 cm × 28.5 cm
© National Galleries of Scotland , Mrs. Lydia Skinner Gift 2006
This chapter will focus on those aspects of mimicking material authenticity introduced here: historical restoration, as well as replication for various reasons and at different times and places, demonstrating the fluidity of the concepts of material authenticity and the importance of context for interpretation.
1 Restoration
The significance of the aura of authenticity has fluctuated over the centuries. One of the earliest examples of restoration practices with an interesting history of value added by mimetic means is the early modern practice of restoring antique sculptures. At that time, collectors of antiquities desired complete sculptures, and hence many fragments were completed by the addition of their missing parts, newly made and sometimes aesthetically enhanced. The Italian painter, architect and writer Giorgio Vasari comments, in his Lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors, and architects (1550), on this type of ‘restoration’: ‘antiquities thus restored surely have more grace and life than those mutilated trunks’, thus indicating the contemporary penchant for the complete.3 Many anecdotes as well as documentary evidence demonstrate the widespread nature of this practice, and illustrate that methods of restoration sometimes coupled an original ‘mutilated trunk’ with precious and exotic materials that were not necessarily ‘truthful’, but rather followed the collector’s taste or interpretation. For example, the French sculptor Nicolas Cordier (1567–1612), working in Rome, restored yet simultaneously embellished many Roman sculptures for the collection of the cardinal, art collector and arts patron Scipione Borghese (1577–1633), by adding different coloured marbles, or even restituting missing parts with bronze casts. The famous Zinghara Borghese for example (marble and bronze, 1.58 m, Louvre, Paris), recorded in 1556 as without a head and in a Roman collection, was completed – most likely by Cordier – with a head, arms and feet cast in bronze, in a largely interpretative manner, as there was no documentation of the original, and following Borghese’s taste for the exotic (Haskell & Penny 1981, 339–341). Cordier was aiming for completion, in the spirit of Vasari, as well as seeking to impart a certain aura of authenticity. Yet he added a seventeenth-century twist based on the dominant taste of the collector and the market. The Zinghara certainly attracted a lot of attention.4
One might argue that these additions followed the contemporary interpretation of antique sculpture by ‘enquiring minds’, as explained by the sculptor Orfeo Boselli (1597–1667) in a dedicated section of his treatise Oservationi della Scultura Antica (1650), where he discusses the process of restoring antique sculptures and reliefs in great detail:
It is not something for an indifferent intellect as others believe, but rather for an enquiring mind, so varied and sublime that it entices the greatest in art. One must attempt to recognise the antique statue, which Virtue or God or character it represents, to be able to follow its bearing, and give it the required attributes to hold, then to give it its due proportions, and most importantly to follow the antique style, if anyone can attempt so much.5
Boselli argues that a thorough knowledge of classical sculpture is crucial for a sculptor’s education. He declares that the replacement of missing body parts was necessarissimo: crucial to the public appreciation of antique sculptures, as most would be placed in gardens and galleries. Restorations executed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1690) and François Duquesnoy (1597–1643), among others, are praised: ‘I cannot omit the figure of a jumping faun owned by the Signori Rondinini, for which the compensation was done by Francesco du Quesnoy of Flanders, for which he remade the thighs, legs, arm and head, marvellously accompanying the antique manner’. However, Boselli feels that many collectors have no esteem for good restorations, lamenting that the work was not well paid, and that it was, ‘to tell the truth, for the most part best left undone’.6
Documentary evidence from the well-preserved archives of the Medici Guardaroba in Florence provides some further insights into the materials used for such restorations. In these documents, which concern the manufacture of many artefacts at workshops established at the Uffizi in 1588, we find quite detailed descriptions of restorations of the antiquaglie in the Medicis’ collection. For example, there is a payment to the sculptor Chiarisimo d’Antonio Fancelli (1588–1632) for the ‘restoration of the head of an antique marble putto, remaking the nose and shoulders, one all of alabaster, the other of white marble, and of the same alabaster counterfeiting a garment for an emperor […]’. The sculptors working at the court were asked to add noses, ears and limbs, but also embellished the statues with curly hair, detailing on garments and more, based on their own interpretation of other known examples and descriptions, yet sometimes fashioned to current preferences. The Medici ledgers show that materials such as marble were ordered in large quantities, and selected based on their similarity with the originals, to mimic certain qualities of colour, transparency and opaqueness: coloured marbles, semi-precious stones, granite, transparent alabaster, and so on. Extensive accounts list waxes, oils and resins that were used to add patina to the antiquaglie, so as to unify and harmonise the aged original parts of the sculpture with new additions.7 All this brings an Aristotelian interpretation of mimesis to mind. Here mimesis added the value of completeness to the damaged and truncated monstrosities, as Vasari calls them, that survived from antiquity; but it also emulated them, through stylistic adaptations and unusual combinations of precious and exotic materials that were not necessarily “truthful”, but rather answered the expectations of patrons and the market. The material likeness between the original and the additions was further improved by polishing the whole sculpture to a uniform smoothness.
In the early nineteenth century, these acts of completion were increasingly critiqued, and guided by the opinion of antiquarians (fig. 6.4). An interesting case of completion followed by de-restoration concerns the Leaning satyr, a sculpture in the collection of classical antiquities in Berlin, which was acquired from the Roman sculptor Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (1716–1799) in 1776 for the royal Prussian collection.8 Cavaceppi was a much-lauded restorer of antiquities. His methods diverged from earlier interventions, as he would leave the original in its sometimes rough state, allowing a surface texture that was different from that of the additions (Conti 2007, 227–229). The British Museum holds a Roman bust which was restored by Cavaceppi (fig. 6.5). The base and bust are indeed modern, and the face shows traces of a red pigment which was removed by Cavaceppi, ‘an ignorant Sculptor, [who] used every means to expunge the red colour by the spirit of salt and acquafortis’, thus removing that part which would in fact identify it as an original.9
Carlo Lasinio, The execution and restoration of sculpture. Etching, 26.2 cm × 18.4 cm
From Francesco Carradori, Istruzione Elementare della Scultura (Firenze 1802)
Marble head from a statue of Jupiter Serapis, wearing a kalathos (a basket used in religious processions), and decorated with olive branches. The bust is modern. The face was originally coloured red. Roman, 2nd century CE. Marble, 59 cm × 31 cm × 33 cm
© The Trustees of the British Museum (1805,0703.51)
In the Leaning satyr, Cavaceppi completed the original fragment, just a torso, by adding a head and right hand with a flute, the missing left arm, the lower part of the legs, and the plinth and part of the tree trunk upon which the Satyr leans, all executed in marble in an early neoclassical style. As the statue was displayed in the park of Sanssouci in Potsdam, it suffered severe weathering, so the sculptor Christian Daniel Rauch (1777–1857) was commissioned to treat it in 1825. Rauch accepted some of Cavaceppi’s additions, but replaced the Satyr’s head and the right hand holding the flute. He confirmed his intervention by inserting a piece of paper into the statue’s head, stating that he, Rauch, had modelled it. Rauch chose to de- and reconstruct the sculpture’s most important features based on other replicas of similar types, and indeed on the opinion of antiquarians (Fendt 2009, 41–49).
Such informed interpretative restorations evoke Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet- le Duc’s (1814–1874) statement in On restoration (1875, 4) that ‘To restore an edifice means neither to maintain it, nor to repair it, nor to rebuild it; it means to re-establish it in a completed state, which may in fact never have actually existed at any given time’. For the architect, ‘[i]n such circumstances, the best plan is to suppose oneself in the position of the original architect, and to imagine what he would do if he came back to the world and had the programme with which we have to deal laid before him’. Viollet-le-Duc implicitly points at the necessitous attempt to restore and encapsulate the spirit of the original. To imagine what the completed state of the sculpture would have been was not just to maintain or repair it, but to re-establish it, for which purpose the sculptor-restorer would need to a be true and skilled artist, and possess the ‘enquiring mind’ mentioned by Orfeo Boselli.
By the late nineteenth century, the “correct” treatment of antique statues entailed removing all added parts, and acknowledging only the remaining ancient core. Alois Riegl’s The modern cult of monuments (1903), written over a century ago, but still relevant today, coins the term ‘age value’ to capture the reasons underlying this shift: ‘From the standpoint of age value, one thing is to be avoided at all costs: arbitrary human interference with the state in which the monument has developed […] Therefore, the cult of age value works directly against the preservation of monuments’.10 The removal of added body parts, and indeed of arbitrary human interventions, is indicative of this approach.
2 Harmonising Traces of Time
Although added body parts were removed from antique sculptures, traces of ageing, such as surface patina or yellowed varnishes, were expected by a public which, during an encounter with objects in a museum, interpreted them as evidence of the artworks’ long life. Nineteenth-century controversies, and even those of today, were often incited when such traces were removed. Increasingly, interference with artworks in public collections, and especially the aesthetic impact of some restoration treatments, attracted public comments and even provoked sarcasm. A case in point concerns the Elgin marbles. When these precious fragments were cleaned, a letter by the anonymous ‘Marmor’ published in The times newspaper for 18 June 1858 represents the emotional reaction of the public:
Sir – I have seen with amazement and indignation the Colosseum – that mighty record of imperial Rome’s magnificence – “restored” in part by the descendants of Goths in Italy, its crevices plastered up and the rich, varied, golden hue, the result of nearly 2,000 Italian summers, obliterated by a monotonous coating of filthy colour. I have seen with like feelings some of our masterpieces in the National Gallery destroyed in order to give a wretched “restorer” a job, and on walking through the Elgin room at the British Museum to-day I witnessed proceedings which in absurdity and atrocity may vie with both those I have named. Sir, they are scrubbing the Elgin Marbles! Will their next act be to fill up their abrasions and have them neatly mended? Now, Sir, I am no worshipper of dirt, but I do say that the tone given by time to antique sculpture […] is absolutely essential to the harmony of its effect.11
The ‘tone given by time’ to antique sculpture, or indeed any artwork, perceived as harmonising in the Romantic Victorian era, adds to the aura of age and authenticity. As David Bomford succinctly describes: ‘It was an age in which prevailing ideas of taste toned down, covered up, disguised and altered paintings in ways that could be trivial or fantastic. The famous golden glow of toned gallery varnish went hand-in-hand with over-restoration and outrageous invention’ (figs. 6.6a, b).12 Matthew Hayes (2021, 130) explains: ‘As objects of their era, paintings were required to illustrate not only authorship but also the Renaissance qualities of beauty, monumentality, harmony and perfection’. This is an approach reminiscent of the idealisation of antique sculptures, which resulted in the addition of missing parts.
Michiel van Musscher, Portrait of Nicholaes Witsen (1641–1717), 1688. Oil on canvas, 54 cm × 48 cm. Before and after cleaning, showing the huge tonal difference when many layers of discoloured varnish are removed
© Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (SK-A-5016)
Alessandro Conti (2012, 279) cites one of the few manuals on nineteenth- century restoration practice, De la restauration des tableaux, written by the restorer Giovanni Bedotti and published in Paris in 1837, which sets out some of those rather interpretative approaches. For example, Bedotti (1837, 44–46) deemed it ‘necessary therefore to retouch and remake only certain inaccuracies, certain distractions of the artist, which one sometimes encounters in well-designed paintings’. Although he warns against ‘extensive’ corrections, he emphasises that ‘sometimes it happens that even the most skilful painters make overly gross and visible errors’, which needed to be remedied.13 Bedotti also advised preserving the patina on paintings by leaving some of the discoloured varnish or dirt, and covering damaged areas with paints ‘soluble in spirits of turpentine, and then patinated with a mixture of soot and ash’.
Patination to mimic the effect of time, using coloured varnishes – perhaps often romantically assumed to have been used by earlier painters – was mentioned in my earlier quote by ‘Marmor’, who suggested that the removal of the toned varnishes known as ‘gallery varnishes’ had destroyed some of the masterpieces held at the National Gallery in London (Anderson 1990, 3–8). Such worries most likely stemmed from the well-known Cleaning Controversy of the late 1840s. In 1848, Charles Eastlake (1793–1865), the then Keeper of the National Gallery, himself a painter and a scholar of technique, commissioned the cleaning of a large number of Old Masters. Over the years, the Gallery’s first Keeper, William Sequier (1771–1843), and later his brother John, the Gallery’s restorer, applied a gallery varnish to the paintings: a brownish solution of mastic in boiled linseed oil that mimicked the supposed golden glow of paintings by the Old Masters. Seguier also oiled the paintings regularly with linseed oil to resaturate them. This latter action caused the paintings to become tacky, and attract dirt and pollution from the London smog. However, as Eastlake stated: ‘that harmonious effect [of the gallery varnish], I scruple not to say, may sometimes be assisted even by a film of dirt […]’.14 By 1844, the date when Eastlake became Keeper, most paintings already showed a dark brownish patina.
Varnishing paintings was not an isolated practice, as the testimony of the Dutch restorer Jan van Dijk (c.1690–1769) demonstrates in his description of the state of Rembrandt’s Nightwatch (1642), which he had been assigned to clean:
As a result of the many layers of boiled oil and varnish that have been applied from time to time, one can no longer see what Company [of officers] it depicts, let alone who are the Chief Officers, for it was thought that it had become tarred over […]15
In the late nineteenth century, there was a taste for ‘brown pictures’, according to Arthur F.E. van Schendel (1910–1979), director of the Rijksmuseum from 1959–1975, who recalls how one Ruheman (1891–1973), at that time restorer at the National Gallery London, told him that when he started working at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in 1929, he found a large amount of ochre pigment in the painting conservation studio that was used to colour varnish (Van Schendel & Mertens 1947, 2).
When the National Gallery pictures were exhibited in 1846, after the removal of this ‘golden tone’, members of the public reacted in force, writing rather acerbic letters to the Times. Even John Ruskin got involved. For Rubens’ War and peace, he argued in 1846, the darkened varnish provided: ‘the most advantageous condition under which a work of Rubens can be seen; mellowed by time into more perfect harmony than when it left the easel’. In Ruskin’s view, the execution of the master is always so bold and frank’ that the painting would be easier on the eye ‘under circumstances of obscurity, which would be injurious to pictures of greater refinement’.16 To this, Eastlake responded, when questioned by the Select Committee in an 1853 inquiry into the Cleaning Controversy, that:
The Rubens may be said to have been long buried under repeated coats of yellowed and soiled varnish. It was found that these could be removed with perfect safety as the surface of the picture had that extreme hardness which the works of this master, above all others, often possess.17
Clearly, Rubens was not Ruskin’s favourite artist; but others were equally appalled by the bright colours and unexpectedly strong contrasts in the cleaned pictures.
In these same years, Frédéric Villot (1809–1875), curator of paintings at the Louvre in Paris, started a programme to remove the ‘brown soup’, or ‘museum gravy’ from items in the collection, to similar public outrage (fig. 6.7). He had restored paintings himself, and was an artist and pupil of Delacroix. He worked with several restorers who, not surprisingly, were also vilified. To the many public protests from connoisseurs, artists and the general public, Villot responded with the defence that the cleaning of a painting was restricted to only the most necessary acts. Concerning the cleaning of paintings by Rubens in the Medici Gallery, he argued that it had produced a large number of:
Henri Fuseli, Two men smoking a picture. Drawing from the Roman Album, 1774. Pen and grey ink with grey wash over graphite
© The Trustees of the British Museum
conversions among the most fanatic partisans of yellow and brown […] there are those who cannot appreciate paintings until they no longer resemble what they were when the artist finished them […] let such people provide themselves with glasses tinted according to their taste.18
However, Villot was heavily criticised, and his actions were clearly viewed as conflicting with contemporary taste. Overcome by all the vitriol aimed at him, the curator ultimately resigned.
Such controversies are directly connected with perceptions, or rather expectations, of the appearance of Old Masters. The fact that paintings do change over time through ageing, restoration and other factors, phenomena not necessarily all understood by the public, created a certain image, an added age value: the romantic myth of the Old Master. For a long time, it was assumed that such toned varnishes were applied by the artists themselves in order to unify and harmonise the colours. Yet William Hogarth’s illustration and text from his Analysis of beauty (1753), showing Father Time sitting on a big pot of varnish, blowing smoke from his pipe onto a canvas, and holding a scythe which cuts through the picture (fig. 6.8), already gestures towards such expectations well before these nineteenth-century controversies. The caricature mocked the ignorance of most viewers and even artists themselves, concerning the changes wrought by time that were intrinsic to the materials being used in their manufacture: ‘Notwithstanding the deep-rooted notion, even amongst the majority of painters themselves, that time is a great improver of good pictures, I will undertake to shew, that nothing can be more absurd’. The changing materials, including the darkening of oil and varnish: ‘disunites, untunes, blackens, and by degrees destroys even the best preserved pictures’. Hogarth (1912, vol. 2, 113) goes on to describe the bright colours used for a still life of flowers, and how they will suffer:
William Hogarth, time as an old winged man sitting on a broken statue, blowing pipe smoke at a dark landscape painting which he has pierced with his scythe; to left, a large jar labelled ‘Varnish’, 1761. Receipt burnished out and sheet trimmed. Etching, engraving and mezzotint
© The Trustees of the British Museum
Shall we wish to see them fall still lower, more faint, sullied, and dirtied by the hand of time, and then admire them as having gained an additional beauty, and call them mended and heightened, rather than fouled, and in a manner destroyed; how absurd! instead of mellow and softened therefore, always read yellow and sullied, for this is doing time the destroyer, but common justice.
No wonder that this illustration was used on the cover of the catalogue of the 1947 Exhibition of cleaned pictures which returned to the Gallery from safe storage after World War II. By this date, the presentation of cleaned paintings was once again the topic of fierce public debate. It provoked a discussion concerning patina in the pages of The Burlington magazine. To prevent a revival of controversy, Sir Philip Hendy (1900–1980), director of the Gallery at the time, provided an extensive explanation of the cleaning treatments, so as to manage expectations (Hendy 1947). He also points at how perceptions of the cleaned works are impacted by the way the paintings were presented to the public during the nineteenth-century controversy, where they were displayed alongside uncleaned paintings:
The problem of cleaning pictures is bound up with the problem of exhibiting them. No picture can ever be considered entirely by itself. Even if it is presented alone, on an easel, our understanding depends to a great extent upon what we have been used to seeing and what we have been led by past experience to expect. When pictures are presented together hung in rows, room after room, any one that is exceptional in tone or degree of individual expression is almost bound to shock.
The introduction to the exhibition catalogue appropriately quotes Milton (1644): ‘If it come to prohibiting, there is aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself, whose first appearance to our eyes bleared and dimmed with prejudice and custom, is more unsightly and unplausible than many errors’. The prejudiced viewer also surfaces in other controversies, such as the cleaning of Michelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel, where the age value or aura of history was, according to some critics and the public, compromised. Their removal thwarted expectations, even for twentieth-century ‘eyes bleared and dimmed with prejudice and custom’. One might say that, as far as the public were concerned, the cleaning almost de-mimicked material authenticity (fig. 6.8).
3 Copying
Material mimesis runs through the history of copies, fakes, versions and replicas, all of which entail an element of material imitation. The sheer abundance of copies and fakes is connected to demand. As Mark Jones (2003, 92–98) states: ‘Each generation, each society fakes the things it covets most’, for political, religious, artistic, or financial reasons. The appreciation of such imitations fluctuates over time. As mentioned above, in sixteenth-century Italy, a desire for original paintings by Raphael stimulated a market for high-quality copies, which were displayed amongst original works by other artists. Many patrons ordered their ambassadors to gain access to major collections to send their court painters to copy famous pieces to complement their own. The practice is described by the Roman collector and personal physician of Pope Urban VIII, Giulio Mancini (1559–1630), in his Considerationi della Pittura (1619–1621), in a discussion of a prince who, when confronted with both original and copy, was unable to distinguish them. He expressed greater appreciation for the copy, since ‘in copies, when they are well made, one possesses two artefacts: the work made first, and a secondary work which imitates it’.19 Here Mancini was most likely referring to Vasari’s description of a copy of Raphael’s portrait of Pope Leo II (1519) by Andrea del Sarto. After the Pope’s death, Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, admiring the portrait in the Medici collection in Florence, asked for the portrait as a gift. His request was mediated by the new Pope, which made it hard for Ottaviano De Medici to refuse, for reasons of diplomacy. However, Ottaviano secretly commissioned Andrea del Sarto to make a copy: ‘when it was finished, even Messer Ottaviano, for all his understanding in matters of art, could not tell the one from the other, nor distinguish the real and true picture from the copy; especially as Andrea had counterfeited even the spots of dirt exactly as they were in the original’. The counterfeiter aimed at a certain material mimesis of the aged original, not only by choosing an exactly similar panel, but also by applying the spots of dirt. The copy was so perfect that a mark was added to the back of the panel so as to be able to discern it from the original. Upon being informed that the portrait was a copy, Federico gracefully accepted it, stating that: ‘I value it no less than if it were by the hand of [Raphael] – nay, even more, for it is something out of the course of nature that a man of excellence should imitate the manner of another so well, and should make a copy so like. It is enough that it should be known that Andrea’s genius was as valiant in double harness as in “single”’.20
4.5The value of copies also as a record of the artist’s genius was corroborated by Cardinal Federico Borromeo (1564–1631) in his treatise Musæum (1625), in a discussion of the didactical and art historical value of his own art collection, which he donated to the Ambrosiana Gallery in Milan. With reference to Pliny’s writings, Borromeo notes how words saved many works from antiquity that would otherwise have been lost: ‘Writers have been so successful at restoring individual features and brush strokes that they have, in effect, brought about a remarkable contest between the pen and the paintbrush (or chisel)’. However, Borromeo does not represent himself as retrieving lost works, like Pliny, but rather as directly reporting on works in his collection, including his copies of well-known paintings: ‘Thus people of all kinds might wish that, just as transcribed copies of ancient books have survived up to the present day, so too, copies of famous paintings might have been made and survived, so that the hard work of earlier men could have benefited subsequent generations’.21 Interestingly, Borromeo gives priority to the copying of masterpieces that are in a poor state through over-restoration.
The mimetic approach to physical composition of these painted copies adapted to contemporary practice. Very little research exists on the practice of copying from a technical point of view, nor were comments made on it in written treatises, which focus more on the value of copies as both record and educational tool. One case study may shed a little light on this. A full-scale copy of Raphael’s Entombment of Christ (c.1608–1609), in the collection of the Hunterian Art Gallery (University of Glasgow, oil on canvas, 174.6 cm × 170 cm), provides an interesting technical comparison with the original, and allows an assessment of the mimetic intentions of the copyist. The original painting has an interesting history. It was taken – or rather kidnapped by night – from Perugia by Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1577–1633), who sought to add the precious work to his collection. When its abstraction was discovered, the Perugians rebelled, and Pope Paul V ordered Scipione to send a full-scale, high-quality copy back to Perugia to replace the original, which hung in a publicly accessible chapel. From the documents, it appears that two copies were made, but today, a copy by Cavaliere d’ Arpino is the only one held in Perugia’s collections. Although over twelve further copies exist of The Entombment, the Hunterian version is the only one besides d’ Arpino’s which is full scale. Scipione Borghese also commissioned a copy from Giovanni Lanfranco (1582–1647) in 1608. While it is uncertain that the Hunterian picture is this Lanfranco copy, technical research has shown that it was most likely painted in Rome around that time, using techniques far removed from Raphael’s, who painted on panel using a light-coloured ground (Black et al. 2012). By contrast, the Hunterian copy is painted on canvas, and here we have found a warm reddish-brown ground layer and a paint layer build-up from dark to light, rather than light to dark as in Raphael’s version. The painter copied by following his personal oil-painting practice, not unlike the addition of body parts to antiquities by baroque sculptors using their own materials and techniques. The intention in this case was not to create a falsification. Yet a high level of similitude was required to obtain acceptance from the people of Perugia, and hence a certain level of intended ‘deception’ may have been involved, to appease the Perugians’ resistance against the original’s confiscation.
Such copies produce an interesting history of mimesis and contextual impact. Even today, and especially within continuously changing artistic practice, as contemporary artists work with editions, reinstallations, remakings, replications, and copies, the production of copies for display, with the originals kept in storage, continues to be a subject for discussion in contemporary restoration and museum practice. Thus material mimesis of the original iteration – whatever the intention – remains an interesting and important discussion topic in this field.
The shark used by Damien Hirst for his work The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living (1991) decayed quite soon after being made. In 1993, the shark’s skin was stretched over a framework. Recalling this treatment, Hirst comments in an interview: ‘It didn’t look as frightening. You could tell it wasn’t real. It had no weight’ (Vogel 2006). Still further decay led the artist to replace the empty shell of the original shark with a new one in 2006, after the work had been sold to a new owner by the Saatchi collection. This time, appropriate preservation techniques were used, guaranteeing longevity. Of art historical opinion concerning the replacement, Hirst states:
It’s a big dilemma […] Artists and conservators have different opinions about what’s important: the original artwork or the original intention. I come from a Conceptual art background, so I think it should be the intention. It’s the same piece. But the jury will be out for a long time to come.
Petra Lange-Berndt (2007), among others, critiques Hirst’s view. In her opinion:
The concept of originality as something singular has become obsolete […] The substitution of the [shark] should thus not be rated as a surrogate of an original but as a remake. The original frame and concept and a similar shark – these do guarantee not authenticity but rather a continuity of the performance.
The careful use of the best preservation techniques by Hirst’s team of scientists suggests that material mimesis plays a key role in the underlying intention of the remake: after all, a new real shark, similar in size and appearance, was used. This seems to be the ultimate material mimesis, pursued by a team of specialists led by the original artist during his lifetime, and safeguarding both the material and conceptual aspects of the work. In fact, Hirst now offers to remake any of his works that contain real animal material every ten years. Yet this practice does draw the work into the realm of temporality of a repeat performance, as Lange-Berndt proposes, and hence its material authenticity becomes rather ambiguous.
4 Faking
Deception really comes into play in cases of intentional mimicry of an original or a style without acknowledgement of authorship. The history of fakes is extensive and increasingly complex. Material mimetic practice by forgers embraces straightforward copying, not necessarily with any thorough understanding of historical techniques, up as well as highly sophisticated forgeries, as seen in some more recently uncovered fakes. A case in point is Han van Meegeren, the famous Dutch painter who had to demonstrate before a court of law that he was indeed capable of making a fake Vermeer painting, in order to prove that the Vermeer he had sold to the Nazi leader Hermann Goering was a fake. Technical research has shown that in Christ and the pilgrims at Emmaus, instead of using the traditional linseed oil as a binding medium, van Meegeren used phenol formaldehyde, better known as Bakelite. On heating the painting to 120° Celsius, the Bakelite hardens into a solid film. Cracks were formed by manipulating the canvas, which were filled with black ink to simulate soiling, producing the aged appearance of an Old Master painting. If, after rubbing the surface with alcohol, a hot needle could penetrate the paint, it indicated that the paint was too soft to be old. The Bakelite, hard and solid, could pass this test. Modern technical analysis, however, has identified the unusual binder, as well as the presence of cobalt blue, a pigment not in existence in Vermeer’s time. To our modern eyes, equipped with more extensive art historical knowledge of Vermeer, it is hard to understand how the van Meegeren paintings – and Christ and the pilgrims at Emmaus in particular – could have been prized by connoisseurs. Their desire to discover such works and their expectations concerning the artist were carefully manipulated by van Meegeren, and this may have coloured their perception and judgement of the fakes.
Although van Meegeren’s case is much discussed, the increase in value of artworks has led to the appearance of many sophisticated forgeries, some of which have been acquired by well-known museums. In 1997, the Art Institute of Chicago bought the small statue of The faun as a work by Paul Gauguin, which, according to the Museum’s press statement, turned out to be: ‘a creative, well-researched forgery of a lost work by the artist produced by the recently sentenced Greenhalgh family from Bolton, England’.
Mimicking material authenticity and making the perfect fake is no longer achieved by replicating an artwork’s visible appearance using modern materials. Nowadays it entails a knowledge of historical pigments, paint handling and ageing processes, on which there is a rapidly growing body of published work. To use Prussian Blue, a pigment introduced to the palette around 1709, in a seventeenth-century ‘original’ – once an indicator of forgery – can be considered foolhardy in the twenty-first century, and any forger might easily know this. Technical analysis is also an increasingly integral part of connoisseurship. Artificial ageing to create a patina and an aura of authenticity, using abrasion with acid or by means of coloured varnishes and soot, may still be practised, but hardly plays any role in the modern art forgeries flooding the market. For example, the recent case of the Italian-French art collector Giuliano Ruffini, who tried to sell several Old Masters, including a Portrait of a man, allegedly by the Dutch painter Frans Hals (1582–1666), in 2008, required thorough scientific analysis. The portrait’s authenticity is now largely doubted, but was initially accepted by the Louvre, which tried to raise the funds to buy it. The affair shows the ingenuity of the forger’s methods and the role of the network of art dealers involved. This, and of course the financial implications of such cases for well-respected auctioneers, led Sotheby’s to establish their own scientific laboratory in 2016, equipped to conduct imaging and scientific analyses to establish authenticity.
Although some forgers, once exposed, become the subject of books, films and television programmes on techniques of fakery, the discovery that a painting is forged also immediately changes our perception of it. As Mark Jones (1990, 15) so aptly observes:
When a “Monet” turns out not to be, it may not change its appearance, but it loses its value as a relic. It no longer provides a direct link with the hand of a painter of genius, and it ceases to promise either spiritual refreshment to its viewer or status to its owner. And even though the work in question remains physically unaltered, our aesthetic response to it is profoundly changed.
5 Conclusion
As we have seen, the notion of material authenticity is configured around certain concepts, which in turn depend on ever-changing contexts. Restorations carried out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often concerned replication, copying or even emulation using similar materials, or sometimes different ones that fitted contemporary tastes. The twenty-first-century conservator, however, would tend to seek a thorough understanding of the physical object and its condition, based first and foremost on scientific analysis that allows identification of the historical methods and materials used, and informed by (art) historical contextual research. The concept of a more scientific connoisseurship is developing rapidly, guided by this new model of conservation.
One could write a similar history of the copy, its status at the time of making, and its function as an art historical document, as indicated by Borromeo, but still relevant now. Here material mimesis did not necessarily need to follow an exact replication of historical processes and materials, as the copy after Raphael’s Entombment demonstrates, but was achieved through contemporary practice and materials, much along the conceptual lines of the restoration of antiquities executed by early modern sculptors. Using copies in contemporary art provides a whole new set of parameters which make for interesting reflections upon historical replication practices. Forgers, however, are increasingly aware of the importance of material mimesis down to pigment particle level, as sophisticated analytical methods can quickly identify any mistakes they make. Bakelite would no longer deceive the critical viewer or forensic investigator now, unlike the connoisseurs of the 1940s who were deceived by the aura of authenticity cleverly put together by dealer and forger, led by a self-evident desire to identify an Old Master as rare as a Vermeer.
In the passage with which this chapter begins, Edmund de Waal points to the technical ingenuity of the potters in Jingdezhen, not just in making copies, but also in adding the patina of age: ‘They have been properly aged. This is skill, another skill’. Skill is crucial, and emerges as the red thread running through this paper: the artistic skill required to restore ‘mutilated trunks’, the skill of accurately imitating age, the skill needed to fake and deceive. The impact of changing tastes and of course market pressures, leading to an increased number of forged modern artworks that are harder to detect and that fetch high prices, or to the mass production of copies of seventh-century Tang porcelain, are issues that run through most of this narrative as well. After all, as the Chinese craftsmen in Jingdezhen said: ‘We can do authenticity if authenticity is what you want’.
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Endnotes
De Waal 2015, 68
Foulis 1776, vol. 1, 93–143.
Vasari 2009
Boselli 1978, 86.
Dent Weil 1967, 84.
Barocchi & Gaeta Bertelà 2002, vol. 2, 644. The quote is from a document in this volume dated 31 October 1617.
On Cavaceppi and his Raccolta d’antiche statue, see Meyer & Piva 2011
Cook 1958, 22, 24, British Museum number 1805,0703.51, online: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1805-0703-51 [accessed 25 May 2020]
Riegl 1996, 6.
Jenkins 2001.
Bomford 1994, 3513.
Quoted in Hayes 2021, 101–102.
Hayes 2017, 107, n. 57.
Te Marvelde 2013. This volume contains further relevant papers on the history of conservation.
Anderson 1990, 3–7; Keck 1984, 73–87.
Anderson 1990, 4.
For a succinct report on the cleaning controversies in London and Paris, see Keck 1984, 73–87, with quote at 79.
Mancini 1956–1957, 327.
Vasari 2009, 83–121.
Borromeo 2010, 19–21.