Annual Report 2008-2009 - National Gallery of Canada

Rescued from the Vault
The Gallery’s most significant
painting restoration ever revives
a Renaissance masterpiece
“It was a fantastic acquisition in 1925,
but its potential wasn’t realized until now”
In 1925, the Gallery’s first director, Eric Brown, acting on a
hunch, bought a portion of an Italian altarpiece, The Dead
Christ Supported by Angels, for the Gallery’s collection. The
piece, by the innovative Italian Renaissance painter Paolo
Veronese, cost a pittance, and its purchase for Canada’s stillnascent
national art collection garnered a good deal of press.
But the painting was in a sorry state: it had travelled from
England to New York upside-down in salt water. And the restoration
efforts undertaken by the Gallery at the time did not
hold up. By 1940 the murky work had been consigned to a
vault.
There it remained for nearly seven decades, until the summer
of 2007, when it was moved from storage to the Gallery’s
Restoration and Conservation Laboratory. There, conservators
Stephen Gritt and Tomas Markevicius commenced the largest
single restoration project undertaken by the Gallery: what
would become a 21-month undertaking, to reassess this
remarkable painting in every way.
Their painstaking work not only unearthed the subtle
beauty of the painting, bringing to light details and colours
that had been hidden by dirt and deterioration for decades,
their labour also revealed the work’s true value. This had been
doubted by Veronese scholars, who considered it the least
interesting of the four portions of the long-ago dissected and
dispersed altarpiece, which depict St. Michael and the two
merchant cousins, Antonio and Girolamo Petrobelli, who commissioned
the work for their family chapel.
In fact, The Dead Christ, the top third of the altarpiece, has a looser, more free style than the other sections – it was farther
away from the viewer, and also from the necessarily more careful depictions of the patrons themselves – and now that it has
been restored, it is arguably the most joyous and visually exciting part of the whole.
All four known portions of the altarpiece – one section of which is housed at the Austin Museum of Art in Texas – were
reunited and put on public display at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in the UK in February 2009. It will appear at the Gallery in late
May 2009. One of 17 major treatments completed by the Gallery’s conservation and restoration team this year, the Petrobelli
“resurrection,” which employed modern techniques and stable materials, will keep the altarpiece in stellar condition for more
than a century.
Both the restoration of The Dead Christ work and the presentation in Ottawa of the reunified altarpiece were made possible
thanks to the generous support of the Members, Supporting Friends and Donors of the National Gallery and the NGC
Foundation.
Paolo Véronèse,
Fragment of the Petrobelli Altarpiece: The
Dead Christ with Angels (detail), 1565. NGC.
Restored between 2007 and 2009 thanks
to the generous support of the Members,
Supporting Friends and Donors of the NGC
and the NGC Foundation
22 Highlights and Achievements