They made it to the last section of the documentation when Mackenzie pointed out the odd finger she had found.
“This is really strange. I couldn’t replicate it anywhere else in the painting. Look at this angel’s little finger on her right hand. It’s so long that it seems like it was a mistake.”
“Did you look to see if it had been touched up by the restorer?” asked Anthony while he looked at the finger using a magnifying glass.
“Yes, there’s no indication that this particular area was altered at all. There’s no damage to either of those two angels and all the paint looks original. I just don’t know why he’d make this finger so much longer. It didn’t catch my eye at first, and when you look at the painting from a distance you wouldn’t even notice it, but now I can’t take my eyes away from it. Have you ever seen anything like this in Daddi’s paintings before?”
Anthony continued looking through the magnifying glass at that area of the painting for a moment and then pulled away. He arched his back and pulled both hands through his hair, resting with his fingers intertwined behind his head.
“No, I cannot really say that I have. At least I do not remember seeing it before. It must have meant something to him, but I am not sure what that might have been.”
“Should we try to fix it?” asked Mackenzie. “I have to admit that it’s sort of driving me nuts.”
Anthony placed the palms of both hands on the workbench and looked at Mackenzie.
“Remember what we do here: we restore, we do not improve. Neither of us knows why he made one finger longer than normal, but I have to assume that he did it for a reason. It is not our place to second-guess the intentions of the artist. You will just have to get used to her long finger.” His tone was terse and it caught Mackenzie slightly by surprise. He paused, as if shaking off a memory, and then continued in a gentler voice. “Now, we need to start putting together a plan of attack for fixing this thing. You want to give it a shot and then go over it with me?”
Anthony had always designed the restoration plan, the specific steps and sequences they would use to repair the damaged artwork. This was the first time that he had asked her to give it a try. In fact, outside of some very simple projects, she had never put together a plan of her own. But she wasn’t going to turn down this opportunity.
“I’d love to,” she said. “I’ll have something for you to review in two days.”
“Sounds good. Looking forward to seeing it. Now, if there is nothing else, I think I am going to call it a day. Given that there will not be anything to review for two days, I am going to take the opportunity to stay home tomorrow and catch up on some things.”
Mackenzie wished him well and started mapping out her ideas on the restoration plan. She was excited about the opportunity to design her own restoration plan. At the same time, she couldn’t help but think about how Anthony had responded to her bringing up the lady’s finger. He certainly hadn’t wanted to spend much time talking about it. Something about it didn’t sit well with him. Maybe he was just losing patience with her constant focus on trivial details. In any case, he trusted her to put together a plan, and that was exactly what she was going to do.
Chapter 15
Anthony sat in his studio, which was large enough to serve as a master bedroom in most houses. Light filtered in from the windows. The teal green walls were covered with paintings of varying styles and schools, mostly late pre-Renaissance through high Renaissance, and mostly Italian. It was an amazing collection of works that would easily fill an entire display room at the Met. On the hardwood floor were stacks of completed paintings in elaborate carved wood and gilded frames. They were stacked five to eight deep in places. There were still more completed canvases simply laid out in stacks on the floor, two and three feet high.
Anthony sat in front of a blank canvas on an easel with his hands lightly clasped under his chin in a contemplative pose. He had taken the next two days off from the Cloisters while Mackenzie worked on her plan for the Daddi they were restoring.
She’ is a sharp girl, he thought. How many people had seen those paintings over the past five hundred years and never noticed anything unusual with the finger length of any of the characters? It was never mentioned in any of the art textbooks, the gallery histories that followed the paintings, or even in any of the previous restoration notes. He couldn’t help but smile when she mentioned the finger. It caught him off guard and he hadn’t known what to say. Sometimes painters do things for reasons that are theirs and theirs alone. That was the truth. Every time he saw those paintings, he noticed the long finger on the beautiful woman. It was the first thing that caught his eye, the first place he looked. But how could he explain that to her? She wouldn’t understand. No one would. Painters have their reasons and sometimes those reasons get buried with the painter. Sometimes they don’t.
He focused his attention on the blank canvas in front of him, much like a writer stares at the blank page. Unlimited possibilities exist with a blank canvas. No decisions have been made, no colors chosen, no figures outlined. Nothing to limit the potential of what the painting would ultimately become. But blank canvases were also frightening. They had their own polarity that pushed outward and made it hard to even get started with the first brushstrokes. Much as the blank page taunts every writer, so too did the canvas. But his task today wasn’t to come up with a new painting. That was always a tedious challenge that could take weeks or even months. No, this was much less stressful. He would be making a copy, a reproduction of an original work, which was in many ways just as much of a challenge as painting an original, but without the up front drama of deciding what and how to paint. That was already decided and had been perfected by the original artist. His challenge now was which artist and which painting to choose.
He had painted reproductions of masterworks from dozens of different artists, many of which could easily be mistaken for originals. But making a true reproduction required extensive research and meticulous attention to detail. If you wanted to pass a reproduction off as an original, you had to match the age of the canvas, which often involved paying for worthless old paintings and then carefully cleaning them to get back to a fresh canvas. Then you needed to prepare it with the same materials and techniques that the original artist would have used. It required choosing pigments that were used at the time of the original work. Making a true reproduction was a painstaking and tedious process, one that Anthony did not feel like undertaking at the moment.
On the other hand, just making a simple copy was straightforward and relatively stress-free. Mostly he did it because he loved the paintings themselves and the style and skill of the artist. Others he painted because they were challenges. Velázquez was always difficult for him to paint. The incredibly clean, almost invisible brushstrokes were hard to replicate. His Portrait of Pope Innocent X was one of Anthony’s personal favorites. Velázquez captured the cold, ruthless ambition of the pope while also showing the frailty and fear of an old man. Trying to master Velázquez’s technique and bringing out the luster from the pope’s scarlet silk robes always confounded him. No matter how many times he painted it, and over the years he had made over a dozen reproductions, he was never satisfied with the sheen of the robe contrasted with the almost featherlike delicacy of the white linen vestments he wore underneath.
When Anthony was at a loss for what to paint, he tended to come back to his favorites, Italian painters of the early and mid-Renaissance. Giorgione, Bellini and Botticelli were some of the artists with whom he felt the most comfort and familiarity.
After some thought and reflection he decided on his next work, Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni by Domenico Ghirlandaio. He had always been impressed with Ghirlandaio’s use of colors. While he had painted in the late fifteenth century, some of his work would foreshadow artists such as Vermeer almost two hundred years later. Anthony chose this painting not only because it depicted a young, beautiful Florentine noblewoman, but also because it had an error of tragedy
to it. The subject herself was gorgeous, dressed in precious clothing with flawless skin and a calm, yet regal countenance. For all of her elegance, wealth and beauty, though, this woman had died in childbirth less than a year after this painting was completed. Her beautiful eyes, looking off into the distance, could not have foreseen what lay ahead. It was exactly this combination of beauty and sadness that appealed to him.
He leafed through one of the many large art books in his collection until he found the appropriate painting and set that up on a small easel beside the canvas. He thought he should be able to get pretty far with two full days ahead and began preparing his palette. Making a solid reproduction was the type of artistic challenge that he relished. It also gave him a feel for the artist himself, the way he used light and color, how he made his brushstrokes. That knowledge and experience would be useful, should he decide to paint other works in the style of this artist.
Chapter 16
Mackenzie came to work early that morning to get prepped for the restoration that she and Anthony were about to begin. The rainy spring was over and the warmth of the New York summer was just beginning. Days were long and the sun rose early, which made it easy for her to wake up at the break of dawn, have a quick breakfast with her father, who inevitably was up no matter how early she rose, and then head to the Cloisters before the traffic started to get heavy.
Earlier in the week the Cloisters had received Filippo Lippi’s Madonna and Child Enthroned with Two Angels from the Met. After working almost a full year at the Cloisters, she realized that it wasn’t uncommon for the Met to send paintings to the Cloisters for restoration. The Met had such a large collection of artwork that they needed to rotate their collections from time to time. That provided the Cloisters with an ideal opportunity to take care of major or minor restorations as needed. For the Cloisters, it was a nice opportunity to add another piece to their displays, even if it was only for a year or two.
Mackenzie had prepared a three-ring binder as well as a digital copy on her hard drive containing all of the research and technical analysis that she had completed over the past four days. She skimmed through the binder again to refresh herself on any key points that Anthony might ask her about when he got started on the painting. She hated to be caught off guard or appear unprepared. Ever since she was little, it was something that drove her to study harder, work later, and focus on details. Fortunately, and because of her due diligence, her fears rarely materialized.
The painting itself was tempera and gold on wood, painted in 1437, and was approximately 4 x 2 feet. Lippi, more commonly known as Fra Lippi, was a highly regarded Florentine painter in the late pre-Renaissance period, patronized by the Medici and the king of Naples, among other notables. Raised as an unwanted child in a Carmelite friary, he took his vows as a friar in 1421. Not to be confused with more devout priest-artists such as Fra Angelico, Fra Lippi actually renounced his vows and left the priesthood after his affair with a nun, Lucrezia Buti, left him with a son, Filippino, and a daughter, Alessandra.
After finishing their initial review, as was their custom, Anthony had written down a series of pigments for Mackenzie to grind, including the quantity and size of the grind for each. They had completed four paintings together and by this point Mackenzie was used to the routine. It would take her at least a couple of days, sometimes even a week to acquire the pigments and grind them to the specifications that Anthony wanted before he would actually begin painting. Fortunately for her, Anthony used the same pigments over again and even the grind was almost identical for each application. In some cases she didn’t even need to grind new pigment because she had enough left over from the previous restoration.
One of her favorite parts of the restoration process was to sit and watch Anthony paint. At first she feared that he would feel self-conscious with her sitting next to him as he worked, but he told her he didn’t mind at all and that he was used to painting with other people around, whether they be other painters, restorers, or technicians. Sometimes he was very quiet and focused when he painted while at other times he was open and talkative. He was always receptive to her questions and answered them thoughtfully, going into as much detail as Mackenzie could absorb.
As they sat together to start the touch up work on the Fra Lippi, he laid out his thin wooden palette, which looked like it was about a hundred years old. The dried, ground pigments were all laid out in a row on a small table next to them along with a glass bowl filled with a mixture of egg yolk and water that Mackenzie had prepared that morning. He never mixed more of the pigment with the egg yolk mixture than he could use in small batches, usually just enough to last him about fifteen minutes. Otherwise, he told her, it would start to dry and the consistency of the tempera paint would become too thick and difficult to control, or worse, it would crack. He always kept five sable hair brushes with him, ranging from pinpoint spotters to broad flats. When he began mixing paint, lead white was first, which he put in the center of the palette, and then he would add ultramarine blue, verdigris green, red cinnabar, lampblack, and yellow ochre in a semicircle around the white.
Once the primary colors were set on the palette, he mixed the shades that he wanted with the pigments getting lighter as they got closer to the white center. There was a simplicity that belied its elegance. With this humble palette, he was able to paint a full range of colors. Mackenzie kept her notepad open and took notes on every step. She also took pictures of the palette and all of the pigments and tempera paints with her iPhone. She smiled to herself because after doing this for the fourth time, she knew exactly how the palette would look. Anthony worked smoothly and quickly with no extra movements. It took him less than two minutes to go from a completely barren palette to one alive with what was almost an infinite range of colors and shades.
She knew from her own experience as a painter that every artist had their own personal palette that they painted from. Some tended to be on the brighter side than others, Van Gogh’s versus Rembrandt’s for instance, but there were certain color schemes that seemed to fit each person and that was reflected in the palette of colors and hues that they worked from. The fact that Anthony had his own palette of colors wasn’t unusual at all. It struck her as odd, though, that he would use that exact color scheme in working on four different painters, especially when those artists were separated from each other by a span of up to three hundred years.
“Anthony, do you mind if I ask you a question?” she asked somewhat sheepishly.
“I would be a bit surprised if you did not,” he replied without shifting his attention from his painting.
“You know that I’m a little bit obsessive when it comes to keeping notes and tracking stuff, right?”
“Yes, which is a very good quality for a restorer, by the way.”
“Well, I’ve noticed that you seem to use the exact same palette of colors no matter what painting or artist you’re working on.”
He brushed his nose with back of his right hand without breaking his focus on the painting. “Hmm, I never really thought of it that way, but you are probably right. It is just the palette that I am most familiar with so it makes it a lot easier to work from.” He continued painting, focusing on folds in the Madonna’s robes that had clearly faded over time.
“But I’ve seen you work on four very distinct artists. Isn’t it hard to match their color scheme with one palette?”
He turned to look at her with what seemed to be a quizzical stare. “Do you think that we were off in any of the shades or colors we used in the four paintings compared to what was used in the originals?”
“No, I definitely didn’t mean to imply that,” she stumbled, hoping that she hadn’t inadvertently offended him. “The color schemes were identical to what the original artist used. The restorations turned out marvelously.” She paused. “But I guess that’s sort of what’s confusing me. I can’t imagine that the same palette would work on a Cezanne as well as a Rembrandt. Vermeer definitely had a different color scheme th
an say Picasso or Giorgione. What if you were restoring a Rembrandt? Wouldn’t you have to change up your palette to significantly darken the hues and bring more auburns, burnt sienna, or Van Dyke brown into the painting?”
Anthony had turned to continue painting quietly while she explained herself. He was quiet and focused, going from palette to painting and back with the occasional nod to show that he was listening. For what seemed to Mackenzie like an hour but was probably closer to a minute, he remained silent.
He set his brush down momentarily, grabbed a smelly, turpentine soaked cloth and wiped his hands and then the wooden handle of the brush. Clutching the rag he turned to her and responded thoughtfully, calmly. To her, he actually seemed intrigued by the question itself.
“I have never really thought of that, but maybe that is one reason why I do not restore Rembrandts, Vermeers, or Cézannes. My area of specialty is pre-Renaissance Italian paintings. The color palette of those artists tends to match my natural palette. I guess I have always set up my palette this way. It is probably like different styles of cooking. I bet if you walked into the pantry of five different chefs from Tuscany, you would find an amazingly similar set of basic ingredients. You would probably find the same thing if you looked at Chinese, Indian, French and Mexican chefs as well. There would be a lot of overlap within a given cuisine. But you would expect that an Indian chef would have a very different set of basic ingredients from which to use than his Italian or French counterparts. It just seems that the palette I work from matches up nicely with the color schemes of those Italian artists I work on.”
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