Century old paintings seldom stood the test of time or the multiple restorations they underwent without a single scratch.
Throughout their lifespan they have often been restored, using the knowledge and means of the specific time which unavoidably left its traces.
With a few examples of restorations, we will show you how we, digitally, can go much further than classic restorations and end up with a result that approaches the original much closer than what is left to admire in museums today.
Our first example is ‘the tower of Babel’ by Pieter Breughel the elder. Literally and figuratively a monument.
The most common damage is a result of the frequent removal of old varnish layers.
With the tower of Babel the varnish has indeed frequently been removed, each time, unintentionally, taking a slight bit of the original paint off as well. Especially the lighter colours and more specifically the soft yellow colour of the building have been affected in this way and have become transparent. The result being that the first under drawing, let’s say the original thick charcoal sketch, has become visible throughout the yellow.
Breughel moved the second under drawing, in fine pencil slightly tot the right, as a result of which the lines of the original charcoal drawing now become even more eye catching. Now it seems as if thick stripes of a dirty grey run down the walls, which of course was never the intention of the master.
All these grey stripes have been carefully removed, almost pixel by pixel, and have been replaced by the original colour so that the tower now regains all of its full original details.
Below you can witness first ‘before’ and underneath ‘after’ our restoration, taking into account that you are now looking at a very small picture on your screen. At real size, the difference will even be much more obvious.
Another huge mistake has been rectified in the following example.
Presumably somewhere in the painting’s timeline rot appeared at the top of the panel and people did not yet have contemporary synthetic resins and components at their disposal.
In the case of ‘the tower of Babel’ they acted quite brutally, put a saw to the panel and cut the top part off. The panel lost a few centimetres at the top as a result of which, sadly, the spire of the tower now nearly ends up under the frame, disturbing the general aesthetics.
We digitally re-painted the missing part so that , in the version we offer, we end up with a painting that does right to the spire .
At the same time we removed some yellow varnish remnants from the grooves in the brush strokes and restored the original colour of the painting. Here below the final result.
On the entire surface we removed scratches, stains and so on. A meticulous and painstaking job, but the final picture looks fresher, cleaner, and much closer to that which left the workshop of master Pieter Breughel the elder.
Other frequently observed defaults are split damages within the panels.
As a support, planks in Baltic oak were used, glued together to achieve large surfaces.
Due to differences in temperature, damage occurred at the seams (See small green rectangular frame below). These were often covered by restorations, using paint with different pigments that later faded and decolorised differently throughout the years following. Also, these newly applied paints with a different composition often peeled off (see broad green rectangular).
All this type of damage we can easily restore like we did in the following example ‘The fall of the rebel angels’ by Pieter Breughel the elder.
Masterpieces limits its offer to paintings of which we possess extreme high-resolution images. During these recordings we work with a verry low shutter speed due to which a specific problem occurs. In the varnish of the paintings we find minuscule air bubbles that tend to reflect the light excessively during the recording and result in hundreds of little white dots becoming visible in the picture. The totality of these dots will affect the colours, so they have to be removed dot by dot.
Our studios are equipped with Eizo 4k monitors with automatized colour calibration so we can strive to an optimal result within the best conditions.
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