The first time I saw conservation was in Lima, Peru, where I was born and raised. And I actually
saw it on Cuzco School paintings. Little did I know that I was going to become a paintings
conservator.
In the past decade, The Met has solidified its commitment to collecting colonial Latin
American artworks. Before 2014, the Museum only had one painting from colonial Cuzco.
That was actually the only painting of colonial Latin America. These ten paintings are an
outstanding gift by James Li's family to the Museum.
In the eighteenth century, there was a large group of Indigenous entrepreneurial artists
that were setting up workshops in the city of Cuzco. And these were extremely prolific,
taking inspiration from a global context, looking at European prints, also imbibing
the local traditions of the Andes, and then making it their own. The Cuzco School has
a predilection for idealized faces, a special detail to textiles, a proclivity for bright
palettes and bright colors. These particular paintings have the traits of a cultural identity.
This is the type of painting they requested.
These paintings were for export as far as Colombia or Buenos Aires, for religious buildings
or even for private homes. In museums, we have palace paintings; these are court paintings.
That was not what everyone else consumed.
Most of the paintings were in stable condition. Some of them had been treated in the past.
Several had layers of varnish that had oxidized over time, as well as overpaint that was covering
original material. The first one that I picked from the group was "Emblem of Folly." This
is a painting that's inspired by a print by Boetius Adams Bolswert from 1624 that was
almost a self-help guide on how to lead a pious life. So the fool is dressed in a jester's
costume. He's mounted on a hobby horse that doesn't take him anywhere. He has a cat in
the basket representing lust, and he's also playing with a windmill toy that would have
been used by a child. Love has just walked into the scene, and she's ashamed. She's covering
her face and pointing to the fool. The angel is looking at the viewer; the viewer becomes
the fool.
This painting had been painted quite thinly, and because of the coarseness of the canvas,
there would be scatter abrasions coated with overpaint very broadly, especially in the
sky. So I was able to use the same solvent to remove both varnish and overpaint. Freeing
the painting through these strange layers was extremely satisfactory. You could get
a sense of the background, the landscape, opening up behind the figures that you didn't
really see before, taken directly from Flemish paintings that traveled to the New World.
After removing the varnish, textural issues became apparent. In the upper right corner,
there were all of these extraneous bumps. I found that these were related to clumps
of the wax that had been used originally to line it. I was able to do testing with a small
tacking iron with a controlled heat setting to see if I could coax some of those down
just a tad. The idea here was not to really make the painting flat by any means, but really
just to diminish the appearance of these deformations.
After cleaning the painting, I looked at it again with UV light, and there was a particular
fluorescence on the angel's robe, which prompted me to work with the scientific department
here and look at the painting with a macro XRF. This is an instrument that scans the
surface of the painting and plots, in a map, all the elements that are present. We've been
able to develop a sense of the palette that was used in this particular painting. We found
indigo in the sky and in the vegetation. The robe of the angel pointed to the presence
of smalt, a potassium glass that is colored with cobalt. It really shows that trade of
European pigments. The left ear of the fool has vermilion, whereas the right ear is actually
painted in cochineal, which is a much darker, deep, and even somewhat translucent color
extracted from the female parasite that lives in prickly pears.
I’ve retouched just the most egregious areas of abrasion and loss. One of the areas that
really came together in this painting was the face of the fool, the wrinkles that showed
his age. By retouching and bringing those together, you can get a sense of what the
artist was trying to tell you: this is a human soul that is tired, that is aged, that has
been doing this for a long time. And you can feel the weight of these distractions that
his soul has had throughout his life.
These works have been largely misunderstood, because we learn to gauge value based on what's
closer to to a European experience. In Western art we are almost obsessed
with authorship. The fact that these paintings come from unknown artists reflects better
the type of artworks that were present in the Andes. This is what people saw.
So as a conservator, I'm trying to flesh out the reality of these paintings in a way that
will give us clues as to who these people were and make connections to our present,
to who we are as Latinx and Hispanics. For me in particular, as a Peruvian, as a person
that grew up with these works, I feel extremely proud to see them at The Met.
I believe that conservation can shine light on the voiceless, on those communities or
artists that have not had the focus before, providing all of this information that may
not be as obvious, and taking these works for what they are, at their own value.