A remarkable Jacobean re-emergence after 200 years of yellowing varnish Courtesy Philip Mould
PAINT RESTORATION OF MESMERIZING
I saw this on Twitter. He’s using acetone, but a cellulose ether has been added to make it into a gel (probably Klucel—this entire gel mixture is sometimes just called Klucel by restorers, but Klucel is specifically the stuff that makes the gel).
Normally, acetone is too volatile for restoration, but when it’s a gel, it becomes very stable and a) stays on top of the porous surface of the painting, and b) won’t evaporate. So it can eat up the varnish.
It looks scary, but acetone has no effect on oils, and jelly acetone is even less interactive with the surface of the paint or canvas.
Will someone PLEASE clean the mona lisa
For those who are wondering, they cleaned a copy of the Mona Lisa made by one of Da Vinchi’s students, and here’s a side by side comparison:
CLEAN THE FUCKING MONA LISA.
A couple problems with cleaning the Mona Lisa:
The Mona Lisa is a glazed painting.
A Direct Painting is one in which the artist mixes a large amount of paint of the correct value and shade the first time, and applies it to the painting. A Glazed Paintingis a painting in which an underpainting is painted, generally in shades of gray or brown, and a allowed to dry, before layers of very thin glaze – a mixture of a tiny bit of pigment and a lot of oil – is applied to the surface. Some artists, such as Leonardo, choose to work this way because it provides an incredible sense of light and illumination (look at how the real Mona Lisa seems to glow).
The Mona Lisa is an incredible work of glazed painting, but that makes it fragile, so fragile that many conservators don’t want to work on it because it’s extremely difficult and a conservation effort go wrong for many many reasons. One of the reasons it could go wrong is that the glazes and the varnish layers are actually a very similar chemical composition, and a conservator could accidentally strip off layers of glaze while removing the varnish.
In fact, in 1809 during its first restoration when they stripped off the varnish, they also stripped off some of the top paint layers, which has caused the painting to look more washed out than Leonardo painted it.
The Mona Lisa also has a frankly ridiculous amount of glaze layers on it, as Leonardo considered it incomplete up until he died, He actually took it with him when he left Italy (fleeing charges of homosexuality), meaning it never even got to the family who had commissioned it, and instead constantly altered it, trying to get it just a touch more perfect every time. That makes it really fragile, with countless layers of very thin paint, many of which have cracked, warped, flaked, or discolored. It’s not just the top layer, its layers and layers of glazing throughout the painting that have slowly discolored or been damaged over time.
Speaking of damage, look at the cracking. That’s called craquelure; it happens with many painting’s (even ones that aren’t painted with this technique) because the paint shrinks as it dries, or the surface it’s painted on warps. Notice that the other painting has very little of it, even though it’s almost the same age.
The reason the Mona Lisa has so much craquelure is because Leonardo was highly experimental, almost to the point of it being his biggest flaw. There were established painting techniques, and then there were Leonardo’s painting techniques. The established painting techniques were created in order to insure longevity and quality, but Leonardo didn’t stick to any of them. This has made his work a ticking time bomb of deterioration.
Don’t believe me, check it out:
This is how most people think The Last Supper looks
But this is actually a copy done by Andrea Solari in 1520.
The actual Last Supper looks like this:
The Last Supper has been painstakingly and teadiously restored, with conservators sometimes working on sections as small as 4 cm a day. To get to it you’ve got to walk through a series of airlocks (AIRLOCKS!?!?!) and they only allow 15 people at a time because the moisture from your breath and your skin particles will damage it. Despite all of the precautions and restoration, it still looks like that.
This is because Leonardo painted the last supper using highly experimental methods. He didn’t use the traditional wet-into-wet method that fresco painters used, and insead painted onto the dry plaster on the wall, meaning the paint did not chemically adhere. Before he even died the painting had already begun to flake. It’s a miracle it’s still there at all.
They’ve done what restoration they can on The Last Supper because the painting will absolutely disappear if they don’t. The Mona Lisa, which is delicate, but much more stable, doesn’t need the same kind of attention. And, like many of his works, is just too delicate to touch, and the risk of doing irreparable damage to it is far too high. The Mona Lisa is insured for something like 800 million dollars, and that’s a lot of money to be ruined by one wrong brush stroke. (fun fact: the most expensive painting ever sold was also a Leonardo, the Salvator Mundi, and it went for 450 million dollars.)
Furthermore, there are probably only 20 or so authenticated Leonardo paintings in the whole world. If you look through the list, most of them aren’t even fully done by him, are disputed, or aren’t even finished. It’s simply too difficult and too risky to restore the Mona Lisa, one of Leonardo’s only finished and mostly intact works, when there’s hardly any more of his paintings to fall back on.
Now the painting you see in the video above is 200 years old, not 600 years old, and I assure you, the conservators decided the risk to restore it was minimal (after extensive research, paint testing, x-raying, gamma radiation, etc.) and that the work they were doing was worth the risk based on the painting’s value.
Conservators make the decision all the time about how much they can do for a painting, because really, they have the ability to completely strip a painting of all varnish and glazes and just repaint the whole thing (which happens to a lot of badly damaged paintings, especially when there’s no way to save them – one of the very small museums in my area recently deaccessioned a Monet because it was barely original, and no one wants to look at a Monet that’s only 20% Monet’s work) – but doing that to the Mona Lisa, removing the artist’s hand from the most famous piece of artwork in history? Hell No.
(also, I’m not a conservator but I’ll be applying to a conservation grad program sometime next year, so sorry if any of my info is at all inaccurate)
I found this really interesting, thanks for sharing.
Celebrating someone’s death seems like a really macabre thing to do. Like I get that people don’t like him because of how his administration dealt with the AIDS epidemic, but promoting someone’s death as a good thing doesn’t sit well with me.
during his administration, we had a problem with abuse of patients in mental healthcare facilities (asylums, but don’t call them that), and his response to it was just to shut down the entire system. he closed all public mental healthcare facilities because a few of them were mistreating patients, and all those mentally ill people suddenly found themselves homeless without the skills necessary to survive in the general populous. he’s the reason why our healthcare system is so terrible, and he’s to blame for the homelessness epidemic (i’ll get into the next reason why he’s responsible for our high homeless population in a sec). millions of people lost everything because of reagan. thousands died.
he also completely restructured our economy. from 1776 until he became president, we had an economic system like no other (look up the American School), but he removed most of the rules and regulations we had to keep the system in place because our system at the time limited accumulation of wealth. we had a built-in buffer that kept most people middle class. when he restructured our economy so he and his friends could get richer, reagan removed the safeguards that kept us out of poverty (most of the time), so now the lower echelons of society were in freefall towards homelessness. people lost their homes and businesses because the rich could do basically whatever they wanted now. superstores like wal-mart rose to prominence and pushed out small businesses because of this. our government also greatly reduced its expenditure on infrastructure. ronald reagan’s greed is why we don’t have enough trains and all our roads are falling apart.
he also expanded our already bloated military while in power. one of his slogans was “peace in strength.” his goal for our country was to get an iron grip around the rest of the world and impose our own agendas on other countries at gunpoint.
One of the first things reagan did when he came to power was to ignore the supreme court’s earlier ruling, ignore the constitution, and try to enforce a mandatory daily christian prayer time in all schools. when government workers went on strike against him and his policies, he fired 11,345 people. he put 11,345 people out of a job because they didn’t like him.
he lowered taxes for the rich, but increased taxes on the poor, contributing to the aforementioned lack of infrastructure and homelessness crisis. he also began privatising the government, which put thousands of jobs at risk and made wealthy capitalists the men who run our country. reagan is responsible for trickle down economics.
after the great depression, our government put in social programs to help people stay afloat, like universal healthcare for the elderly and disabled, basic income (the government paid people to dig ditches if they couldn’t find any other jobs. the ditches didn’t serve any purpose, but those people needed money and the government was willing to give money to anyone who worked), and food stamps. ronald reagan slashed all these programs and more, like the EPA, which made sure we were a “green” country.
as a result of these slashes, people who had been secure on government assistance programs were now having to take out loans and get into debt, which jeopardised our economy. we had a stock market crash because people were becoming too poor to buy stocks, and our national debt increased by 3 times. we went from $997 billion in debt to $2.85 trillion in 1987.
he also pushed us further into the cold war. previously, our relations with russia were cooling down a bit, but during reagan’s second term, he began actively threatening russia again. ronald reagan brought us to the brink of a nuclear war that would have killed all humans on earth.
Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher, the most hated prime minister in UK history, were close friends. he was also personal friends with Donald Trump.
Under reagan, we resumed a history of violent military imperialism in foreign countries, most notably lebanon, afghanistan, and pakistan. In lebanon, we tried to stop a revolution against an oppressive regime, and in afghanistan and pakistan, reagan ordered the CIA to train civilians and create a military force to fight russia for us. Reagan created the taliban, a militant group that even today publicly dismembers people for playing games in public. they cut off children’s hands. He also began dealing weapons with China, betraying our longstanding ally, Taiwan, destabilising politics in the pacific. Under his orders, we secretly aided african and south american military dictatorships in crushing their opposition. He assisted Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran who started the 1979 revolution, in purging political opposition from the government. in 1988 our military shot down an iranian commercial flight, killing 290 civilians.
Reagan was a Nazi sympathiser and referred to slain SS officers as “victims” of the war. just to make sure you read that right: Ronald Reagan supported the Nazis.
He declared the war on drugs, a movement that has greatly increased the disproportionate incarceration rates of african american and latino men in this country.
During Reagan’s second term, 115,000 people were diagnosed with AIDS and 70,000 died of it. Reagan did nothing to curb the spread, despite knowing that the AIDS epidemic almost exclusively affected black people and the LGBT community. when he learned how many people were dying and who they were, he laughed. he laughed at our suffering while we were dropping dead.
In short, Ronald Reagan was a wealthy, selfish, greedy, capitalistic, imperialist, racist, ableist, homophobic, genocidal, antisemitic, warmongering, backstabbing murderer. Ronald Reagan was a monster.
Wow and this didn’t even cover the crack epidemic
It doesn’t cover the crack epidemic, or the various wars in South America, that resulted in the refugees immigrant crisis now.
“My name is Robert Lee IV; I am a descendant of Robert E. Lee, the Civil War general whose statue was at the center of violence in Charlottesville. We have made my ancestor an idol of white supremacy, racism and hate. As a pastor it is my moral duty to speak out against racism, America’s original sin. Today, I call on all of us with privilege and power to answer God’s call to confront racism and white supremacy head-on. We can find inspiration in the Black Lives Matter movement, the women who marched in the Women’s March in January and especially Heather Heyer who died fighting for her beliefs in Charlottesville.”
whenever I feel like I’m bad at writing, I go download the current hottest New Adult romance novel on amazon and read it while laughing and throwing popcorn at my computer screen
Not once have I ever read an ebook on amazon that was anywhere near as good as my favorite fanfics. Not once. If you guys think that there’s some lofty writing perch you have to reach before you start successfully self-publishing e-books, you should think again. Go download the most loved newly-released romance ebooks on amazon (books that people have happily paid cold hard cash to read) and start feeling 1000% more confident in yourself. The experience will do more for you than a full-body massage.
Ok I have to reblog this and edit it to say that there is (1) self-published amazon kindle erotica novel that’s better than fanfic and it’s Land of the Beautiful Dead. I was wrong and hasty. There is one exception. Otherwise, this all holds true.
funeral-biscuit 