A Pennsylvania museum has solved the mystery of a Renaissance portrait in an investigation that spans hundreds of years, layers of paint and the murdered daughter of an Italian duke.
Among the works featured in the Carnegie Museum’s exhibit Faked, Forgotten, Found is a portrait of Isabella de’Medici, the spirited favorite daughter of Cosimo de’Medici, the first Grand Duke of Florence, whose face hadn’t seen the light of day in almost 200 years.
Isabella Medici’s strong nose, steely stare and high forehead plucked of hair, as was the fashion in 1570, was hidden beneath layers of paint applied by a Victorian artist to render the work more saleable to a 19th century buyer.
The result was a pretty, bland face with rosy cheeks and gently smiling lips that Louise Lippincott, curator of fine arts at the museum, thought was a possible fake.
Before deciding to deaccession the work, Lippincott brought the painting, which was purportedly of Eleanor of Toledo, a famed beauty and the mother of Isabella de’Medici, to the Pittsburgh museum’s conservator Ellen Baxter to confirm her suspicions.
Baxter was immediately intrigued. The woman’s clothing was spot-on, with its high lace collar and richly patterned bodice, but her face was all wrong, ‘like a Victorian cookie tin box lid,’ Baxter told Carnegie Magazine.
After finding the stamp of Francis Needham on the back of the work, Baxter did some research and found that Needham worked in National Portrait Gallery in London in the mid-1800s transferring paintings from wood panels to canvas mounts.
Paintings on canvas usually have large cracks, but the ones on the Eleanor of Toledo portrait were much smaller than would be expected.
Baxter devised a theory that the work had been transferred from a wood panel onto canvas and then repainted so that the woman’s face was more pleasing to the Victorian art-buyer, some 300 years after it had been painted.
Christ men have been Photoshopping women to make us more “pleasing” since for-fucking-ever.
Also, Isabella de’Medici is nice looking, but also has that look in her eye of all Medicis: “I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to kick your ass, buy you and everything you own, or have sex with you. Perhaps all three.”
Carnegie Museum! 😀 That’s right downtown. You rock, Ellen Baxter!
There’s an excellent video about the restoration and you can hear the disdain for the cover up dripping from the conservators words.
Here’s an exercise! I cannot draw cars well. I don’t like drawing cars.
The first sketch was from memory without looking at any photos of a car. The second was traced from a photo of a car. The third, without looking at any photos or previous sketches. I still can’t draw cars very well but a bit more about what they look like are embedded in my memory. :>
Tracing is a wonderful way to practice. This works for more than just machines, if you trace something then it helps you learn how it FEELS to draw something accurately, which gives you the freedom to experiment, exaggerate, and stylize your art without sacrificing structure and recognizeability.
I get a lot of compliments on the way I draw muscular people. If I had not gone through a phase of tracing models then I would not have learned how it FEELS to draw proportional muscles. It greatly improved my art in the long term, and now when I use reference photos I find that it’s easier for me to make sense of what I’m looking at.
I saw this beautiful fanart by Matsuyama Miyabi of the Adams Family in kimono. But I was kinda sad that Thing didn’t get his own little kimono, so I drew him in one.
i don’t know blue personally so i don’t know her wishes regarding memes made off of her artwork (but i do feel pretty shitty that a piece so personal to her has been turned into something like this), but she included a signature in the original that has been cropped out. the signature was put there for a reason. she also says on her page that she loves to see her art shared as long as credit is given.
anyways, here’s some of her more recent work (but without the signatures removed)
so yeah please check her out- her art is gorgeous and she’s a wonderful human being who’s very open about her experiences with mental illness.
