Freyda Spira: Working in a collection where there are 1.5 million objects, you often find
hidden treasures, and I feel very lucky that as a scholar of German printmaking from the
Renaissance, I was able to open the doors of the storeroom and find this incredible thing.
The Triumphal Arch of Maximilian was commissioned around 1514 by the emperor, and the arch was
modeled after Roman arches, so instead of having a marble arch, he wanted something
more ephemeral, but he still wanted to give it impact. And the wonderful thing about prints
is that they’re mobile. You could advertise about yourself by using prints.
The arch itself is made up of thirty-six sheets, and it’s twelve feet high and ten feet wide.
And it’s one of the largest prints ever made during this time. It contains his entire
genealogy, all of his alliances, all of his land territories, and he worked closely with
a set of artists, Dürer among them.
Dürer is the greatest German printmaker of the Renaissance. He also advances the techniques
in significant ways, so that it’s not just about line and white, it’s about tonality,
it’s about scale of sort of the blacks into the grays.
What’s interesting is that our Arch is in none of the literature. In even the most recent
books about the Triumphal Arch, there was no indication that The Met had this.
I immediately realized what this was, and I reached out to Rachel Mustalish, our paper
conservator, and brought her into the discussion immediately.
Rachel Mustalish: When you study works on paper, you’re looking at works from across
centuries, and each era has its own characteristics, each country, each culture, about the inks
they used, the paper they used. You’re looking at them intensely to see how they’re made
and the conservation problems.
Freyda Spira: This work was acquired in 1928 by our founding curator, and he had them line
the sheets to stabilize them and put on false margins, so that all of the sheets were the
same size.
Rachel Mustalish: They didn’t have the original look that they should’ve had. So in discussion,
we decided to do some initial examination, some testing, to see what is possible. And
what we found was that the set was a beautiful impression; it’s really, really rich ink.
But the paper has suffered a bit just from time, from the lining, from some handling,
and so there was some staining, tears, areas where the lining was incomplete. And because
this was such a fantastic set, we decided together that this would be a set that should
undergo a large conservation project to not only preserve it for the future by taking
out the acidity, by taking out the color, by repairing the tears and remove the lining,
but also bringing it back to a more original beauty that it had when it was made.
Very standard practice in looking at works on paper is to use with what’s called a
stereo binocular microscope. It gives you a sense of three-dimensionality when you’re
looking at a magnified work of art. And through this, you can see the incredible fineness
of the lines that the artists and artisans were able to achieve: everything from the
way that the ink indents on the paper; you can see the way the fibers sit on the surface.
Each piece itself, being twenty-four-by-eighteen inches, for paper conservators, is a fairly
large size work on paper, particularly when you’re doing what are called wet treatments.
And we did, in fact, submit these to a fairly invasive type of treatment. These were put
into baths; they had their linings removed. Now, of course, it’s not just a regular
bath of water. It’s a particular type of what’s called deionized water that has then
been further modified by various ions and chemicals to make sure that the pH, the conductivity,
and other issues are the most appropriate for the paper, for the ink, which was what
we found through testing and early examination.
Freyda Spira: We realized that our arch is a proof edition, because on our arch and on
first editions, you see text corrections that were all printed, and then laid down on top
of the original text. We discovered that there are sixteenth century inscriptions on the
back of the sheets, and so we could see the history of this object as it moved through time.
Rachel Mustalish: What we wanted to do was look at it as a set, to get a sense of what
it looked like as a whole. So we laid them out, and it was thrilling to see how it actually came
together as a set, how the artists themselves
constructed this incredibly intricate rendition of this arch.