EGN NEWS DESK
In autumn 2022, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp reopened its doorways after an 11-year-long renovation. Yet even after the top-to-bottom refurbishment, which added appreciable gallery house at a price ticket of $105 million, there was nonetheless work to do.
The beating coronary heart of the Royal Museum — the premier assortment of Flemish artwork in Belgium recognized by its Dutch acronym, KMSKA, which initially opened in 1890 — is the room generally known as the Rubens Gallery, positioned on the prime of the museum’s imposing interior staircase.
Under its almost 50-foot-tall ceiling, the gallery homes monumental altarpieces painted by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), the grasp of the Flemish baroque. “It’s the most important room of the outdated museum and was really conceived particularly to point out Rubens’s works,” defined Koen Bulckens, curator of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century artwork on the museum.
Because of each their dimension and their age, the altarpieces couldn’t be taken out of the museum in the course of the constructing’s current overhaul. Instead, they have been stowed beneath the Rubens Gallery in an inner artwork depot that was constructed on the positioning of a Cold War-era bomb shelter between 2011 and 2013 as a part of the primary section of the museum’s full-scale renovation.
Last autumn, restorers started work on the most important altarpiece by Rubens housed on the museum, “Enthroned Madonna Adored by Saints” (circa 1628), a dynamic composition that exhibits the Virgin Mary, with the Christ little one on her lap, and her husband Joseph behind her, surrounded by 14 further saints; it was commissioned to embellish the excessive altar of Antwerp’s Augustinian church. In its body, the portray measures almost 20 toes tall and 15 toes vast; it weighs near 800 kilos. Because the mammoth work can’t go away the gallery, the restoration — projected to final till September 2025 — is being carried out in full view of the museum’s guests in a makeshift studio that takes up roughly 1 / 4 of the house within the Rubens Gallery.
In early February, restorers have been painstakingly eradicating varnish to disclose the unique brilliance of Rubens’s colours. Kayla Metelenis, a 30-year-old graduate of the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, presently in Antwerp on a Fulbright scholarship, was working sq. inch by sq. inch to strip the canvas, held on its aspect, of the thick, yellowish varnish with assistance from a material tissue soaked in solvent.
“There was a restoration intervention within the Nineteen Sixties — the primary documented restoration — and we all know that quite a lot of varnish was utilized at the moment. Prior to that, it’s somewhat extra hazy,” Ms. Metelenis defined. “So it’s most likely a buildup of fairly a little bit of varnish, and that’s why it’s so thick. And there’s additionally a big quantity of dust on the floor,” she mentioned, including that they hoped to make it to the halfway level within the portray by the tip of February.
The distinction between the shiny, varnished portion of the canvas and the matte areas the place the varnish had been stripped away was hanging. A billowing material on the Madonna’s lap turned from a murky inexperienced to a vibrant blue. The background additionally cleared up. It was nonetheless overcast, extra Flemish than Mediterranean, however the sky beneath the clouds was now azure slightly than grey. After the canvas is totally cleaned and broken areas are discreetly crammed in, a brand new varnish will probably be utilized to re-saturate and defend the floor. “The colours, they’re stunning now, however a varnish will really make them deeper and richer,” Mr. Bulckens mentioned.
When the restoration is completed on the “Enthroned Madonna,” the museum’s workforce will transfer on to “The Adoration of the Magi” (circa 1624), a virtually 15-foot-tall altarpiece well-known for the pair of camels smiling within the background. “The Adoration” can also be a totally autographed work, that means that Rubens painted it totally himself. Admiring the wood panel portray, Mr. Bulckens mentioned it took the artist about two weeks to execute.
An enchanting distinction to those gargantuan work is “Black on White,” the museum’s intimate present of Rubens’s prints that’s on view till May 12. The greater than 60 engravings, etchings and woodcuts that make up the presentation within the intimate and dimly-lit print room characterize lower than a tenth of the Royal Museum’s holdings of prints by the Flemish grasp.
Not solely was Rubens a creative genius, he was additionally a shrewd businessman and self-promoter. During his lifetime, he commissioned quite a few prints based mostly on his work. These works on paper circulated with larger ease than his canvases may (particularly the massive altarpieces) and performed an important position in spreading Rubens’s fame as one of many main artists of his age. Etchings, engravings, and woodcuts have been among the many reproducible media of the Seventeenth century. But nothing may have been farther from the artist’s thoughts than utilizing printmaking know-how to make low cost black-and-white copies of his work.
As “Black on White” reveals, Rubens was exacting concerning the prints that circulated throughout his lifetime and exerted super creative management over them to make sure the very best high quality reproductions. He selected his engravers, etchers, and woodcutters with nice care, collaborated carefully with them and infrequently drove them loopy.
Unusually, the exhibition is ordered not chronologically or thematically, however by printmaker.
Lucas Vorsterman, certainly one of Rubens’s first engravers, is represented by a collection of prints of spiritual and biblical figures, together with “Susanna and the Elders” and “The Stigmatization of St. Francis of Assisi,” engravings from 1620 that present a exceptional vary of tone and shading. Two years later, Rubens’s relationship with Vorsterman ended abruptly. Lizet Klaassen, a analysis curator on the Royal Museum who helped put the present collectively, mentioned nobody knew precisely what occurred; there have been rumors, nonetheless, that Vorsterman was so fed up with Rubens’s orders that he attacked the artist with a burin, a needlelike engraver’s instrument.
“He was a horrible boss,” Ms. Klaassen mentioned of Rubens. “But in one other means, the craftsmanship of the engraver along with the creative instructions of Rubens made each of them develop,” she mentioned.
In addition to Vorsterman, who finally reconciled with Rubens, the Royal Museum’s exhibition highlights Vorsterman’s disciple, the grasp engraver Paulus Pontius.
Rubens additionally had a specific affinity for woodcuts, a way that was thought of outdated by the early Seventeenth century, in response to Ms. Klaassen. Part of his attraction to woodcuts was the respect Rubens felt for the Venetian Renaissance grasp Titian, who had used the medium to breed his work. Pointing to the stylistic similarities between the woodcuts of Titian’s work and people who Rubens commissioned from the woodcutter Christoffel Jegher, Ms. Klaassen advised that it exhibits “Rubens competing with Titian,” regardless that the Italian artist died a yr earlier than Rubens was born.
A collection of three states, or proofs, of “The Rest on the Flight into Egypt” (circa 1633-36) comprise quite a few small adjustments and corrections that illustrate how carefully Rubens and Jegher collaborated. Walking across the exhibition, these prints strike a up to date viewer as creative masterpieces on their very own, not merely old school copies of Rubens’s grander, full-color compositions. However, Ms. Klaassen warned that Rubens, though personally invested in these prints, would probably not have thought of them as artistic endeavors.
“We primarily take into consideration these prints by way of cash, as a result of they have been costly,” she mentioned, including that creative concerns would have probably been secondary to monetary ones for Rubens.
“It was excellent P.R.,” she added.
