You really get to know the painting when you're working on it. It becomes a bit of a friend
– even when you're cleaning it it gives off a certain smell, so you can smell if it's
been in a smoky environment and you could tell it comes from Apsley because, you know,
there's a particular sort of dark dust that we see on the paintings there.
This painting is of Orpheus enchanting the animals and it shows the figure in the centre
of Orpheus in this twisted pose and he's enchanting these animals with his music that’s so beautiful
it's drawn the animals out of the trees. We have the birds at the top, the lizard on the
tree trunk. Orpheus is playing a lira de braccio here. He's got a bow in his right arm, and
it's a four-stringed instrument. It sounds a bit like a cross between a cello and a viola.
There’s the large figure of the lion in the middle with the unicorn, deer and the
dragon. The music was so beautiful that it’s brought together these figures of the lion
and the unicorn, which were traditional enemies.
The Orpheus myth is, I think, perhaps the first story we ever told each other. It’s
a story about love, it’s about death, it’s about trying to conquer death. It’s about
someone who is so wonderful at what he does that the whole world is enchanted and charmed.
Looking at the painting from a sort of technical perspective, it does feel quite Titianesque.
The softly modelled flesh tones, the quite self-assured brush strokes, especially of
the figure. And this sort of drapery which is created with a pinkish under layer, and
then this red glaze on top is also something that you see in other Titian paintings as
well. Also this little dog in the left-hand corner is taken straight from another Titian
painting called the ‘Venus of Urbino’.
The animals are perhaps less Titianesque and there’s
a thought that they might be by a different hand.
The Orpheus myth is about Orpheus, who was the greatest singer the world had ever known.
When he plays the whole world comes to listen, the birds come, the beasts come. He falls
in love with Eurydice, and Eurydice falls in love with him. They get together, they
get married and they’re totally in love, but – [gasp] – Eurydice is killed. She
dies by a snakebite. She’s taken down to the underworld. So Orpheus sees that it’s
his purpose now to go to the underworld and bring her back from death. To sing so beautifully
that death will say yes, have Eurydice back. He does that, it works, he leads her back
towards the light, but they say you must not look back until Eurydice is safe with you
in the world again. And of course he gets just to the light, and he turns around – [gasp]
– and Eurydice is taken back to death again.
When we got the painting into the studio we did some technical analysis on the painting.
That was done by the Hamilton-Kerr Institute. We had an x-ray done and some infrared done,
which often tells us about the under layers of the painting. The infrared was the most
interesting because it revealed a lot of changes that had happened to the painting and that’s
quite a Titianesque feature in itself. So we see that here around his elbow there’s
been some changes in the figure. Around his back, this is where the first outline was.
You can see it’s slightly more transparent here.
The painting was quite dirty when it came into the studio. So we started by cleaning
off the dark dust which had settled on the painting, just with little swabs, moistened
with water or saliva – saliva works very well as well. And we moved onto cleaning the
painting. I filled areas – you can see little losses and damages – with a chalk putty.
And I’m now at the re-touching stage. So it’s had a very thin varnish put over it
and I’m touching out the losses with these paints here.
There are certain ethics and guidelines which we sort of stand by when we’re making the
decision as to where to stop and what to re-touch. For instance there’s been quite a lot of
change that’s happened in the painting. The sky has lost a lot of its blue colour
because it was painted with smalt which is a pigment which degrades. The foliage in the
trees would have been quite green originally but it’s been painted with copper resonate
and it’s gotten browner. But we wouldn’t glaze over large areas to
make it greener because we’re trying to strike that balance of showing as much as
the artist’s original intention as possible without doing too much.