You know, the only way one can really come to terms
with who was Gossart as an artist,
and what did he make,
and what were his great achievements
in the early 16th century, is to go and see everything.
So I did go to Antwerp,
and this portrait was brought out for me to take a look at.
And I was, well, amazed.
We decided that the picture should be cleaned
in order to really find out for sure
whether or not this was by Gossart.
First, we always do cleaning tests
just to see what sort of solvents are going to work
and what it will take off.
And the tests indicated that there was
a very lively, bright palette underneath
that was going to be revealed with the removal of the varnish
and, really, a great deal of overpaint and restoration.
And it was really difficult to get any sense of the subtlety
of the painter's technique.
So my job was to remove all of that and restore it.
The most dramatic change occurred in the sitter's coat.
Before it was cleaned, it had a gray appearance,
almost no color, and once the varnish came off,
it was this vibrant bluish-green,
and the sculptural quality came alive
once all of those materials came off.
We have this additional issue
of the coat of arms in the background.
The coat of arms was intended to give an identity to the sitter,
which was discovered to be a false identity,
so to cover it up seemed the best option.
Without it, the figure sits so much better in space,
and it's so much easier to see how striking this portrait is.
Gossart has a tendency to use a gray underpaint,
which, when that's topped
with the warmer tones to build up the shadows
and the sort of rosier parts of the cheek,
it gives an almost stone-like, carved quality to the flesh.
He builds up those-- the shadows
with very, very thin glazes of transparent paint.
They're very important in his creating these
smooth, kind of dramatic shadows
in the face and in the neck.
The gold damask is painted with a real economy of materials.
By using basically three colors,
he can make this amazing folded material
with a woven pattern in it.
I think there were a lot of wonderful aspects
of this painting that you just couldn't see
in the state it was in when it came in.
And to be able to pull that out from underneath all of that muck
that was on top of it was really exciting.
In the Prado Museum today
is a extraordinary painting by Gossart called the "Deesis."
It is Christ in the center,
Virgin Mary at the left, John the Baptist at the right,
and an angel singing overhead.
Very important is the fact that it copies, in part,
these figures from the 1432 "Ghent Altarpiece"
made by Jan and Hubert van Eyck.
What hasn't been known is,
"How close was that connection?"
If you study the "Deesis" with infrared reflectography,
you see that each of the heads
is actually made on paper first
and put down on panel,
and then the whole painting is worked up in oil.
Just how closely he worked with it, though,
is quite astonishing.
For example, the size of the heads that Gossart made
are a one-to-one relationship
with the "Ghent Altarpiece" heads.
And he traced it so closely that, in Christ's head,
there is still the drawing for the fillet
that God the Father is wearing
with the big pearl in the center of it.
So you find bits and pieces
of the exact tracing of the "Ghent Altarpiece"
that wasn't carried out fully in Gossart's painting.
And he also then did very wonderful freehand drawing
for the position of the hands, which would have been, then,
a deviation from the "Ghent Altarpiece" design.
In the process of going to look at all the paintings
I could for the Gossart exhibition
and the study of them,
I was prompted by opening an exhibition catalog
of works that had gone from Budapest to Japan
to go to Budapest to see the "Christ on the Cold Stone."
This work had been dismissed
forever as a workshop piece,
or not by Gossart,
and when they brought it out,
and we had a chance to really examine it very closely,
I was quite sure that this not only was by Gossart,
but also would be a work that, if cleaned
and restored, would be a stunner.
When it arrived in the studio,
it was very distorted by a discolored varnish,
a very dark brown varnish,
which shifted the color, both tonally
and in terms of its color palette.
An oxidized varnish does two things:
it acts, like, as a sort of milky layer on the...
on dark tones, so you get a sort of reduced tonality.
It also shifts color enormously.
So despite that, it was still a beautiful painting,
but it really needed to have that varnish removed.
The retouching in this painting,
a great deal of it is concentrated
where there is a split in the panel.
And sadly, at some point when it was repaired,
in order to deal with a slight disjoin,
they simply scraped away to make a smooth transition.
I retouched in that area so volumes in the picture
would read rather than being interrupted.
One of the other features that was very striking
was the blue tones,
this-- these very rich ultramarine blue tones here,
appeared to have, in a sense, perished.
Sometimes ultramarine has a problem we refer to
as ultramarine sickness.
It becomes sort of ashen, it loses all its modeling.
And it very much looked that that was the case
with this picture.
Then when I started cleaning it,
the striking thing was just locally,
it was as if the varnish had lost saturation
with the surface,
and the whole form reemerged,
and it was a very striking change indeed.
You cannot help but get a...
a heightened sense of respect when you
spend a lot of time looking at this under magnification.
Gossart, almost above anything else, is a sensualist.
He's so aware of surface, of material,
and he is sort of brilliant at depicting
those different qualities of surface.
He is a master of the depiction
of these marble-like flesh tones,
these carefully modulated forms.
The figure also gets into some amazing contortions.
In this case I think it works very well
'cause that sort of corkscrew movement
seems to communicate anxiety and tension,
which in the sense of Christ
meditating on the Passion that is to come,
I think works very, very well.
When we work on paintings,
one of the privileges is the sort of, the intimate contact,
and it also allows for quite intensive technical study,
and there's some interesting aspects
in terms of this picture.
There's strong evidence that Gossart reduced
the composition in the course of painting
on this side.
It appears that the panel was cut
and then framed before it was quite finished.
This white cap,
to the left of it, you see a little orange cap
that's decorated with red and white that was painted first.
The picture was put into a frame,
and then Gossart changed his conception
and changed this to a simpler white form.
Among the changes that were made to the painting
during the course of execution,
there's a key one here: this figure who looks out at us.
Originally, Gossart just left space for the hand
gripping onto the base of the column.
And then at a late stage,
when he had completed the blue garment,
he changed the hand completely to a pointing finger.
And the whole significance
of that character changes accordingly
because it's very much a character conscious of you
looking into the picture
and him pointing to the significance
of the figure of Christ.
It pulls you into the scene in a very different way
because you are now suddenly a part of this crowd.
The viewer, I think, confronted by this additional information
that comes from technical examination thinks,
"Ah, magic!"
But in fact, what it really does for everyone
is help you to look more closely,
make you want to look more closely.