Felipe IV takes another Velazquez at Met
Felipe IV takes another Velazquez at Met
. It had to be one more time stripping the box all its varnish and repainting. Only as, in a restoration that has lasted nearly a year, it has been getting to the bottom. And the result is that a new Velazquez, according to The New York Times reports. For years, since 1973, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, bean considered the portrait of Philip IV a simple, tibiagold, work young velazqueo workshop, but not directly from the master's brush. The painting, of considerable size, had been in the collection of the Met since 1914 and has always been exposed.
MET
Portrait of Philip IV
His condition led to doubt bean specialists, but the head of the European collection of paintings by the great New York museum, Keith Christiansen, heard the verdict of those same experts were coming to look at the picture: You know, Keith, the only way that be able to decide in this measure qu Velazquez's painting is clean and see how est. The fact is that this full-length portrait of Philip IV est Met documented and preserved the, all points bulletin cash, bill signed by Velazquez, dated the same year that the artist finished the work, 1624.
The second table rediscovered
The chief restorer,The day that Kobe Bryant did note, Michael Gallagher, admits how difficult it is to know the real state of a table full of varnish and repainting rusted, dating from 1911, when he still belongs to the collection of Joseph Duveen. When the canvas was degraded in the seventies, along, wowgold, with nearly 300 other works, some of the most important scholars disagreed with the decision of the museum, but they could not dnd his thesis without a thorough study. That is what has been done now. And is not the first surprise, as recalled in September 2009, in this revision of the collection of European paintings at the Met, appeared a portrait of a gentleman who also ended up being a Velazquez. This case, segnn a museum just be possible to reverse a decision we have not received the unanimous backing of the scientific community, when studios, the media or the debate reached its optimum point.
The cleaning of the portrait of the young King was a company rather more difficult than that of the Portrait of a gentleman, both by the size of the table as his delicate state of conservation. Among the areas most affected is the left eye of the young Philip IV, which has been lost, perhaps as a sign of an act of vandalism. When they reached the bottom of the intervention is realized that the picture was retouched so it was kind of falsificacin, an image far from the original that may have led to the storage box.
Mystery of the portraits idnticos
But you are of Velazquez soon emerged: the character of a bill of the head, the delicacy of the hand, the elaborate gold chain, the clothing … X-rays and discovered new clues. Beyond the losses, there is a similar portrait of Philip IV by Velazquez in the Museo del Prado kept hidden from the eyes, a composition similar to that of the Met's box. Experts do not know why. There are similar pictures, both in the Prado, in Boston or Dallas. This last, of the Meadows Museum, is so similar that has served to reshape the eye lost the restorer. In addition, almost a year now, the Met specialists traveled to Madrid to see how to match two pictures with the composition X-ray visible on the canvas in the Prado. The result was surprising: the overlap is total.