E. H.
Gombrich, Controversial Methods and Methods of Controversy,
The Burlington Magazine, Mar., Vol. 105, No. 720, 1963, pp.90-93 [Trapp
no.1963C.1]
SIXTEEN years ago the Director of the National Gallery concluded his introduction to the exhibition of
cleaned pictures with words of admirable fairness:
However safe the method, however correct the principle, there will still be a margin for legitimate
discussion concerning the finished product. Much of the criticism comes from those who best know
and most love the pictures, in the ownership of which they have a share. Their criticism may help
those who are responsible never to forget the extent of their responsibilities and to be always re-
examining their principles and methods.[1]
How fruitful discussions could be if they were conducted in this spirit. Nobody who criticizes the policy
of a great institution expects such criticism to be accepted without further argument. What one has the
right to expect, however, is that the answer should concern itself with the substance of the criticism.
What might be loosely called the National Gallery's `side' in the present controversy[2] has fallen so
short of this standard that two separate issues have unfortunately emerged. The methods of
controversy must be shown up before the substance of the present disagreement can again be
brought into focus.
Mr Denis Mahon professes to deplore `a tendency .. . towards the breakdown of communication
between some art historians on the one hand and some of those with particular experience of
conservation problems on the other' (p.461) . I must at least be grateful to him for having inserted the
qualifying `some', which I have italicized. For I should not like it to be forgotten that I originally
produced that small piece of evidence, which seems to be such a thorn in the flesh of the radical
strippers, in support of an authority whose `particular experience of conservation problems' Mr Mahon
can hardly deny, however much he may disagree with his views – I mean Professor Cesare Brandi,
for many years head of that Istituto Centrale del Ristauro in Rome, to which the world owes the
rescue of many precious treasures endangered by the war.[3]
Professor Brandi, it will be remembered, had argued that both technical and textual evidence pointed
to the aesthetic relevance of veiling effects in which (in Baldinucci's words) `the colouring ... is
pleasantly obscured as if it was covered by a very thin veil'. Professor Brandi's conclusion was briefly
that in these subtle effects glazes, varnish and patina sometimes interact in a manner that calls in
question the controversial methods of radical cleaning. It was when the spokesmen of the National
Gallery disputed this widely held view[4] that I tried to draw their attention to the famous report in Pliny
in which a veiling procedure is attributed to Apelles.[5]
Having made my little point, and having had to make it twice, I would not have dreamt of returning to it
once more if Miss Plesters and Mr Mahon had shown that they had at least read these six lines of
text. Instead they used it for a remarkable demonstration of how many irrelevancies can dance on the
point of a needle. Since this demonstration, unfortunately, is presented with such assurance that
many readers have taken it for an argument, I must take note of the breakdown and spell out the text
of which I am as tired as many of my readers must be.[6]
What is it these six lines say?
(1) The great painter Apelles invented many things from which others profited, but one of his
inventions nobody could imitate; it was a procedure by which he spread something on his finished
paintings which both protected them and had certain aesthetic effects.
The Experimental Officer of the National Gallery's scientific department now lists the titles of fourteen
recipe collections from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries which do not contain the prescription for
that coating of which Apelles took the secret into his grave (p.453). Can she have read the text under
discussion, and can she really think that medieval recipe books could have the remotest bearing on
the problem raised?
(2) The stuff Apelles used for this inimitable dual purpose procedure is called by Pliny an atramentum,
a `blackening'. Miss Plesters hopefully suggests that the word is ambiguous because a work by
Caneparius of 1619, entitled De Atramentis, does not only deal with inks (p. 453). Few books deal
only with the subjects mentioned in the title, but there is really no need for discussion here, since the
same book of Pliny which treats of the history of painting also treats of painters' media and has a
lengthy paragraph on the various forms and uses of atramenta, including a report on a special
atramentum obtained by Apelles from burned ivory and a remark that atramentum suspended in
vinegar makes indelible marks – not, one presumes, invisible ones.[7]
For this is the main argument Miss Plesters and Mr Mahon use in disputing the relevance of the Pliny
passage for any question concerning tinted varnishes. The atramentum, they claim, may well have
looked dark in the jar, but lots of materials which look dark in bulk may still be transparent when
spread sufficiently thin. Apelles' secret atramentum may not have differed in this respect from later
varnishes which also look dark in the jar and transparent on the panel and yet have a certain
colouristic effect.
If my critics had read through the whole of the Pliny passage with an open mind they could have
saved a good deal of atramentum. For Pliny's description of what the ‘atramentum' did to the colours
makes these speculations about its supposed colour in the bottle quite irrelevant.
(3) The aesthetic effects of the atramentum are described in Pliny's brief text in three different forms
of words and in one comparison. The first wording is doubtful, since the text is probably corrupt. It
says that the stuff 'by reflecting .. . brought out ... ' The earlier readings are that by reflection it brought
out the brightness of the colours, or that by reflecting the brightness it brought out the colour, but
there are at least three more variants, one that by reflecting the light it brought out the colour white,
one that it brought out the brightness of all colours, and one that it brought out another colour.[8] But
this and other uncertainties of reading are less damaging than might at first appear, for we learn
further that the atramentum served the important purpose of preventing the brightness of the colours
from offending the eye and `imperceptibly to impart austerity' to `excessively brilliant colours'. The
effect, we learn, was as if one looks through a lapis specularis, a window stone– and it is clear from
the context that the comparison is with a semi-transparent medium which protects the eye from
painful dazzle.
Pliny's description, then, may be obscure, but it is not as obscure as all that. Sellers was surely right
when she concluded from the comparison of the atramentum with a lapis specularis (a word she
translates as talc) that the procedure would be that of a coloured varnish, a glaze. She was wrong in a
footnote which I am now accused of having ignored, and which Mr Ruhemann echoed, `that it is
absurd to talk of glazing that raised the picture's colour as a whole, and yet toned it down'. If she
thought it absurd she need not have accepted the reading of `album', a word I actually queried in my
original communication.
It so happens that a very interesting fresh interpretation of Pliny's report has meanwhile been put
forward in a recent book on Apelles that puts all former speculations out of court.[10] But it will be
remembered that I was never concerned with the technical meaning of the passage as such, but only
with its effect on Renaissance and post-Renaissance aesthetics: the idea, in a prominent place, that
there was such a thing as `an excessively florid colour' that could and should be toned down in a final
operation to prevent its brilliance from offending the eye. My small point was precisely that a
procedure which performed the function of protecting the painting from dust and dirt (an aspect I did
not, of course, overlook, for instance in David Durand's account, as Miss Plesters alleges at length (p.
454), but which I did not think worth repeating in every rehash) also performed a colouristic function
which is allegedly reserved exclusively for glazes. It is this duality of purpose which makes the
passage so inconvenient to those who are fond of insisting that it is only the modern critics of their
methods who persistently confuse these two purposes. It must be possible to remove varnishes
without harming the intended aesthetic effect, for varnishes ought to be totally transparent on the
picture. They therefore must not have had a share in the intended appearance of the painting, at least
not beyond that of a replaceable gloss that any fresh protective coating could supply.[11]
Pliny never stated – nor did I – that the atramentum of Apelles, whatever it was, must have been
spread evenly on the picture or that it could not have been possible to modulate the thickness and
effect of the glaze which emulators of Apelles may have used in later times.[12] Nor do I see the need
to accept the alternative between a tinted glaze which must exclusively tone down the colours and a
totally transparent varnish that can enhance them. The effects of semi-transparent layers can hold
their surprises. One of these possible effects is precisely that the layer does not only tone down the
colours but also facilitates colour induction, the appearance, that is, of complementary colours in
adjoining areas. It so happens that this effect increases dramatically if the contours of the inducing
patch are blurred or masked. Hence even the superimposing of tissue paper will `bring out' a
complementary colour from a neutral area.[13]
One hesitates to draw attention to such effects, for when I attempted to point to the interaction of
colours in my previous article Mr Mahon retorted `that it was perhaps hardly necessary to
demonstrate in such detail the existence of a principle which has been regarded as a commonplace
for centuries' (p.470). There is a special branch in the Department of Nemesis which looks after those
who claim to know all about a subject. Mr Mahon proceeds to explain that the precise action of a
coloured overall coating `... in distorting the original interrelationship of the colours can quite easily be
verified' (ibid.) by means of coloured spectacles. I had the privilege recently of discussing some of
these complexities with a leading authority in the psychology of perception. His reaction to Mr
Mahon's proposal was distinctly uncomplimentary.
There is an important difference between the filtering-off of certain wavelengths from the entire field of
vision and the inspection of a limited area on which a transparent layer has been superimposed.
Moreover,`when two surfaces are in close contact with no space between them, they are said to be in
"optical contact", and light reflected out from a transparent surface making optical contact with a lower
one is quite different from that which is obtained if the two surfaces do not make contact'.[14]
I do not wish to imply that none of these facts is known at the conservation department of the National
Gallery. But I would suggest that if this debate is to lead beyond all this transparent blackening it
should lead to a closer consideration of the optical, psychological, and aesthetic effects on which the
magic of painting rests. So far only questions of abstract colour harmony have been raised, and that
in the most subjective terms. The transformations colours undergo within the illusionary world of
representational painting are even less well understood. In my book on Art and Illusion I have only
scratched the surface. But before this activity is carried further from the `Library' to the `Studio' we
should really make a start with investigating the various ways in which veiling may mobilize rather
than deaden the visual imagination.
The National Gallery Report insists that `a general coating of yellow or brown reduces the form and
the space which were the preoccupation of most artists throughout the whole tradition of the
Renaissance and as long as its influence continues to be felt. Yet the strengthening of form and the
enlargement of space which so often emerge as the result of cleaning are rarely acknowledged by
these critics' (P.82).
Nobody doubts that the effect described can sometimes result from judicious cleaning of darkened
pictures. It is not these cleanings, however, which have evoked criticism. Is it not possible, on the
other hand, that the removal of all perceptible layers of veiling make a picture look flat? The illusion of
space and form may well be lessened when the bare pigments on the canvas obtrude too forcefully
on our attention. Perhaps this is one of the explanations of the impression which some of these
paintings make of being `stripped' or `naked' – paint rather than paintings ? And would not this
psychological fact also help to explain the comforting assurance which one often hears uttered, that
these newly cleaned pictures will look less raw in a few years' time when they again recede behind
that veil we are not allowed to call patina?
The National Gallery Report and the two writers in this journal find it particularly incredible that such
effects should have been calculated in advance by Venetian painters who took the subsequent
alteration of appearance into account. Yet this is precisely what Ridolfi praises in Tintoretto.
Admittedly, he does not speak of the effect of varnish but of the influence of distance which,
characteristically (and very one-sidedly), he attributes to the action of the intervening layer of air.
Discussing the master's paintings in the Scuola di San Rocco, the seventeenth-century critic mentions
those who missed in these paintings a certain softness of colour that appeals to the eyes of the less
understanding. `However', he writes, `delicacy and finish are not always to be praised in an artist, and
they are specially superfluous in compositions placed at a distance from the beholder, since the air
which comes in between our sense of sight unifies the bold brush strokes with a rare blending,
rendering them sweet and pleasant at a distance. Hence Tintoretto is commended by wise artists,
since he was able to imagine the effect which his paintings would have in situ . . .'[15]
What really happens in the eye, or rather in the mind, when distance leads to a loss of detail and how
far such effects can be simulated by a veil of varnish, are problems which are certainly not sufficiently
investigated.
Questions of this kind cannot be disposed of by reference to the tone of a sleeve and a book which
was revealed when a particular varnish was removed from a particular Guercino (p.469). We are, or
ought to be, speaking about nuances which almost elude description and may yet affect the whole
appearance of a painting.
Mr Mahon asks the rhetorical question: what conception Dr Kurz and I can have of `the practical
processes of picture restoration', if we are really able to persuade ourselves that our comparison with
architectural restoration `makes sense' (p.47o). Neither Dr Kurz nor I believe that Viollet-le-Duc
dipped a swab in acetone when he restored a cathedral. But his work was guided by an image of
what he took to be the pristine appearance of an ideal cathedral. Even the picture restorer must and
will be influenced in his difficult task by the image he has formed of the original appearance of the
work he hopes to restore. He will be influenced by his scale of values, his unconscious bias and his
conscious convictions. It is this image which the art historian has the right to question, and to which,
perhaps, he can make a contribution.16 Referring to the blue in the coat of Titian's Virgin (No.635),
the National Gallery Report admits that it `undoubtedly strikes harsh to many observers'. However,
they write, `there is nothing to show that Titian had soft or timid taste' (p.84). This is the kind of remark
that reveals in a flash a whole scale of values to which the art historian has a right to object. Why
should it have been `timid' in the early Cinquecento to avoid harsh colours, and why should the artist
be defended against the presumed accusation that his taste is `soft' ? Were the Vivarini considered
more courageous than Giorgione? Mr Mahon takes exception to my `curiously comprehensive
pronouncement' that to earlier generations `predilection for bright colours was a sign of an
uneducated taste' (p.463). Contempt for glitter and gaudiness is certainly a commonplace in all
discussions of taste. Here, too, there is still a great deal of scope for research, both in the psychology
and in the history of taste.[17] But the kind of evidence we need must have more relevance to artistic
taste than has the colour of trousers worn in Titian's time, which the National Gallery Report seriously
cites in support of policy decisions.
I hope I do not underrate the importance of scientific evidence for our understanding of painting
techniques and the problem of restoration.[18] But I do not think that this evidence alone will ever
decide whether particular paintings should be stripped of all varnish and only coated for protection
with transparent stuff;, or whether, even in cleaning, their skin should be respected and possibly
restored, as many with `experience of conservation problems' continue to advocate and to
practise.[19]
According to Pliny, the greatest painter of antiquity was of the opinion – fear nothing, gentle reader –
that the cobbler should stick to his last. Miss Plesters, no doubt, can list a number of books from the
Middle Ages and even from modern times in which this advice is not referred to, and yet it would not
be a bad thing if we all took it to heart. The restorers' excursions into Italian philology, the Official
Report's discussion of the history of taste, the scientist's interpretation of a classical author and the
connoisseur's explanations of colour theory have not exactly encouraged me as an art historian to
follow the National Gallery's invitation and inspect their laboratories. Such a visit can teach the
historian no more than a visit to an operating theatre can teach the layman in medicine. If he is wise
he will not try to judge whether a particular operation is or is not necessary, or whether a particular
surgeon is taking certain excessive risks. But if widespread uneasiness develops about a particular
kind of operation advocated by one school of surgery at one famous hospital, even the layman can
attempt to judge – yes, even if he were blind – what sort of arguments are used to counter this
criticism.
It is for this reason that admirers of the National Gallery and its devoted staff have a right to regret the
absence from this debate of the scholarly spirit that marks their famous catalogues and that inspired
the Director's words quoted at the beginning of this article. Such methods of controversy may be quite
effective in the short run – but what is meanwhile to happen to the pictures?
1 An Exhibition of Cleaned Pictures, London [1947], [Link]. The paragraph ends with the remark:
`Such criticism fails in its effect, however, if it falls too wide of the mark'. It did not look at the time as if
this was meant as an escape clause by which any criticism could be barred.
2 HELMUT RUHEMANN: 'Leonardo's Use of Sfumato', The British journal of Aesthetics, I, No.4; the
Annual Report of the National Gallery [1962]; JOYCE PLESTERS: `Dark Varnishes – Some Further
Comments', THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, CIV, No.716 [November 1962], p.452. It is perhaps
worth mentioning that my reply to the first of these in The British Journal of Aesthetics, II, No.2 has
not been so much as mentioned in the remaining three publications.
3 CESARE BRANDI: `The Cleaning of Pictures in Relation to Patina, Varnish, and Glazes', THE
BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, XCI [July 1949] and XCII [October 1950].
4 NEIL MACLAREN and ANTHONY WERNER: `Some Factual Observations about Varnishes and
Glazes', THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, XCII [July 1950].
5 My letter to THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, XCII [1950], p.298; `Dark Varnishes: Variations on a
Theme from Pliny', ibid., CIV [February 1962], p.51.
6 I should like to quote this text here in the version I should perhaps have quoted from the outset, the
reading in the Teubner edition (Leipzig [1897]) by C. MAYHOFF, v, p.265: 'Inventa eius et ceteris
profuere in arte; unum imitari nemo potuit, quod absoluta opera atramento inlinebat ita tenui, ut id
ipsum, cum repercussum claritatis colorum omnium excitaret custodiretque a pulvere et sordibus, ad
manum intuenti demum appareret, sed et luminum ration magna, ne claritas colorum aciem
offenderet veluti per lapidem specularem intuentibus et e longiquo eadem res nimis floridis coloribus
austeritatem occulte claret.' The letters printed in roman type are the editor's emendations. For some
variant readings, see the note below.
7 Pliny's description is found in Historia Naturalis, xxxv, 41-3: `Atramentum, too, must be considered
an artificial pigment, although the earth also provides it, and in two different ways. For in some places
it oozes from the ground like brine, in others the earth itself is sulphur-coloured and proves suitable
for the purpose. Painters have been found who are prepared to dig up charred material from the
tombs in which it was interred. All such methods are indecent and newfangled, for atramentum is
already prepared from soot in various ways, by burning turpentine resin or pitch, and special
buildings, without exit for the smoke, are constructed for the purpose. The finest kind of atramentum is
thus made from the wood of the pitch-pine. It is sophisticated with the soot from furnaces and bath-
houses, which is used as ink in writing books.
Some make atramentum by drying and igniting wine-lees, and assert confidently that, if the lees come
from good wine, the atramentum produced resembles Indicum. Polygnotus and Micon, the celebrated
Athenian painters, made their `black' from grape-skins and called it tryginon. Apelles had the idea of
making it by burning ivory, and the product is called `elephant-black'.
An Indicum, the method of preparation of which I have not as yet been able to discover, is imported
from India. It is made also by dye-workers from the black scum which adheres to copper dye-pans. It
is manufactured, too, by charring pitch-pine wood, and grinding the charcoal in a mortar. This latter
variety is wonderfully like the pigment of the cuttle fish, but is never made from these creatures. All
atramentum is perfected by the sun, writing ink being finally made up with gum, and painters' black
with glue. Marks made with atramentum, which has been brought into the fluid state with vinegar, are
very difficult to remove by washing.'
(The Elder Pliny's Chapters on Chemical Subjects, Part II, edited with translation and notes by
KENNETH C. BAILEY, London [1932], pp.85-7.)
8 The readings are in the order quoted: ‘idipsum repercussu claritates colorum excitaret'; repercussu
claritatis colorem ... excitaret'; 'colorem album excitaret' (Sellers); ‘colorum omnium excitaret'
(Mayhoff); ‘colorem alium excitaret', which is the reading adopted in J. OVERBECK: Die Antiken
Schriftquellen, Leipzig [1868], P.356.
9 For the expression see PLINY: Historia Naturalis, xxxvi, 160 (Bailey's edition, quoted above), p.267.
The editor adds: `It seems certain that the lapis specularis of the Romans was, in many cases, one or
other variety of mica, a group of rock-forming minerals including muscovite (or Muscovy glass), biotite,
lepido lite, and other minerals. These minerals cleave readily into tough elastic sheets of great tenuity,
used even now as windows in peep-holes of furnaces and other places where the temperature is too
high to permit the use of glass. They range in hue from absolutely colourless and transparent (as in
muscovite) to black and opaque (as lepidomelane) ... lapis specularis may also mean gypsum or
selenite, a mineral which sometimes occurs in transparent folia, which may be as much as a yard
across, and, like mica, have been used for windows.'
10 WILHELMINA LEPIK-KOPACZYNSKA: Apelles, der beruehmteste Maler der Antike, Berlin
(Akademie Verlag) [1962], pp.23-31. The author here expands the hypothesis of her dissertation,
colores floridi et austeri (Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts, 73 [1958], 79-99)
according to which colores floridi is the technical name for glossy colours, colores austeri for matt
earth colours. She makes a case for the majority of the first-mentioned category to have been glazes,
the second body colours. It is the excess of sheen or gloss which, in this interpretation, is reduced by
a thin layer of powdered burnt ivory suspended in some transparent medium. According to the author
its dual purpose was that of protection and the colouristic effect of making the surface imperceptibly
matt – the opposite, as it happens, from the effect discerned by Miss Plesters and Mr Mahon.
11 I have drawn attention in my recent article to a certain danger of circularity in this classification:
whatever yields to our solvents must be a replaceable varnish and only what remains can have been
a glaze. I should have thought that these methodological doubts – which PROFESSOR BRANDI also
raised in a different form in his rejoinder ([1950], p.297) – would have been a more interesting subject
for discussion than the mythical glass bottles in Apelles' studio. These, I fear, owe their prominence to
a careless phrase in my letter concerning Mr Witherop's experiment with varnishes. I had wondered
there `how the evidence I tried to present can be affected by the technical analysis of un-tinted
varnishes'. Mr Mahon now gravely suggests that I `interpreted, as analysis, Mr Witherop's admirably
precise description of the materials he employed', and appears to believe that analysis is always
chemical analysis. I admit that I should have said `the technical analysis of the procedure and effect',
but I find it hard to reconcile Mr Mahon's desire to score with his advocacy, on the same page, of a
`genuine pooling, without distrust and arrière-pensée, of the most diverse forms of knowledge'
(p.461). Old varnishes, by the way, appear to get more and more transparent the longer this
controversy goes on. In 1950 Messrs MACLAREN and WERNER still wrote that `the extent to which
the artist may have allowed, if at all, for the colour of the fresh varnish must remain a matter of
speculation' (p.192).
12 I do not wish to go over this ground once more, particularly since Miss Plesters has conceded the
wide diffusion of Pliny's works. There were actually sixteen editions of Pliny in Italy before 1500 and
nine Italian ones (the first being Landino's of 1474) before Vasari inserted Adriani's paraphrase in his
second edition. The official Report's aside that Titian's age was at that time `very advanced' strikes
me as particularly irrelevant.
I must be grateful to Miss Plesters and Mr Mahon for their diligent search for other references, but I
fail to see why these references are represented like refutations of my argument. Miss Plesters, for
instance, writes that H. E. RASPE in his Critical Essay on Oil Painting [1781], implies `that the use of
(tinted) varnishes was considered rather disreputable' (p.455). She can have read Raspe as little as
she has read Pliny. He says that `many excellent modern artists ... use this ... Van Heyden has
probably glazed and varnished his pictures in such a manner. Some Venetian masters are supposed
to have done the same.' It is true that fraudulent pasticcio painters are mentioned who deliberately
darken copies to make them look old, but this reference is introduced as an example of secret recipes
and only confirms the similarity which the atramentum had in the mind of every unprejudiced reader
with the patina of old paintings.
13 C. E. OSGOOD: Method and Theory in Experimental Psychology, New York [1953], p.234. The
author subsequently describes another such phenomenon of interaction, which, to his knowledge, has
not been reported previously. It concerns the opposite effect of colour summation in which a white
patch is tinged with the tone of the adjoining blue, if the abruptness of the contour is broken down.
New observations of this kind therefore continue to be made.
14 RALPH M. EVANS: An Introduction to Color, New York [1947], p.72.
15 CARLO RIDOLFI: Le Maraviglie dell'arte, ed. D. VON HADELN, Berlin, II [1924], p.33: `Ne già
come alcuni poco conoscitori del buono dell'Arte si credono, furono quelle opere fatte dal Tintoretto
per disprezzo, non vedendovisi certa sfumatezza di colori, the appaga l'occhio de' meno intendenti;
poiche non sempre è lodato nel Pittore l'vsar le delicatezze e'l finimento, che senza dubbio e
superfluo in que' componimenti spetialmente, the vanno collocati in luogo distante dalla veduta,
poiche l'aere, the si frapone alla virtù nostra visiva, unisce con raro condimento le pennellate
gagliarde, rendendole soavi e grate nella distanza. Quindi è, the da saggi Artefici vien commendato it
Tintoretto, poiche seppe imaginarsi l'effetto, the far potevano le Pitture ne' luochi loro, usando un
finimento bastevole & proportionato al sito ... '
16 I should like here to quote the wise and modest words written by JAKOB ROSENBERG on the
occasion of the Rembrandt exhibition: `Controversy still rages between the two schools of thought, as
to how far one should go in the cleaning process ... Unequipped as this writer is on the scientific side,
he hesitates to give any advice on this thorny problem. But from what he has seen in recent years he
becomes more inclined to recommend moderation . . . Perhaps more gradual cleaning procedures
with milder means are possible, and a stopping at the right time, even though some of the old varnish
is left on the picture surface (the pictures themselves are old, after all, and the varnish was
considered a part of the painting procedure by the old masters). In the National Gallery in London it
was possible this year to see side by side two Rembrandt paintings representing the same old lady
(Margaretha Trip) at about the same time, one of them thoroughly cleaned and showing the kind of
harsh effect just mentioned, with an exaggerated contrast of light and dark and a loss of transitions
and overtones; the other one uncleaned, i.e., with its old varnish which, however, is still sufficiently
transparent and shows just a slight yellowing. I have not the slightest doubt that Rembrandt himself
would have preferred the effect of the uncleaned picture. One has only to look at the master's
etchings and drawings to be convinced how vital to him was the total tonal harmony, and
consequently the transitional tones as well as the overtones. And I doubt whether it was any different
with Titian, with Rubens, with Velazquez – in short, with all the great painters' (The Art Quarterly, XIX
[1956], p.389). Can the Trustees have had cognizance of this opinion and yet authorized the
`cleaning' of the very picture which a leading authority on Rembrandt had singled out for its
convincing appearance?
17 Cf. my articles `Visual Metaphors of Value in Art', Symbols and Values: an Initial Study, ed. L.
BRYSON et al., New York [1954], pp.255-79, and 'Psychoanalysis and the History of Art', The
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, xxxv [1954].
18 The official Report of the National Gallery professes to infer from a remark to which I was provoked
in a public discussion – that I would consider some of my evidence valid `even if I was blind' – that I
regard `studio experience' or `laboratory findings' as `irrelevant' (p.79). I would see the non sequitur
even if I were blind.
19 The principal method of controversy to which one must object is the implication that there is no
controversy among the informed. Mr Ruhemann's unforgotten characterization of the cleaning
controversy as `the perennial delight of the uninformed' (loc. cit., p.234) is only the extreme example.
Need one quote another expert such as VALENTINER who remarked more truly that `we are passing
through a period in which there exists a considerable difference of opinion regarding the restoration of
old masters' (Art Quarterly, XIX [1956], P.396)? Yet, when I introduced my criticism in this journal with
a motto from Doerner: `I may be wrong ... but our old paintings are too precious to subject them to
controversial experiments ...' the Report of the National Gallery placed it `on record that experiments
at the National Gallery with new materials and methods (my italics) are made only on worthless
pictures acquired for that purpose' (p.75). The method in a nutshell.
