Longing for Italy

From February 10 to May 28, 2017, the Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden is showing paintings of Italy from its own holdings that have never been exhibited before. However, nothing of the blue Italian sky would have been visible without restoration.

An exhibition of paintings of Italy is a popular but not particularly surprising idea for a German museum. After all, the longing for Italy, the fascination for the special light of the south, for the magnificent Italian cities and the elegantly crumbling ancient buildings existed even before Goethe, was fueled by him and has never completely abated since. The Dresden Art Collections have nevertheless decided to put on such an exhibition, showing 130 “19th century paintings of Italy between Lorrain, Turner and Böcklin” and – in addition to loans from all over the world – managing to exhibit many unseen, unknown works from their own depots.

In addition to paintings by well-known Dresden artists such as Carl Gustav Carus and Ludwig Richter, 36 unrestored Italian paintings by lesser-known painters – for example by Johann Carl Baehr, Sophie Prell, Franz Albert Venus and Heinrich Gärtner – that had not been exhibited for decades were stored there. The abundance is not surprising, as the curators Andreas Dehmer and Heike Biedermann explain in a detailed catalog text. After all, enthusiasm for Italy was high among Dresden artists, and the Dresden Academy of Art sent scholarship holders to Rome for years, as did other academies.

“Without the restorations, however, there would often have been nothing to see of the blue Italian sky,” says Marlies Giebe, head of the restoration workshop at the Old Masters Picture Gallery and New Masters Gallery of the Dresden State Art Collections. Together with a team of 18 restorers, she has been able to restore 36 paintings and 38 frames over the past two years. “The varnish on most of the paintings we restored was very yellowed,” says restorer Giebe. Giebe had to certify that Oswald Achenbach’s large-format painting “Rocca di Papa in the Alban Hills” in particular was severely disfigured by the yellowed varnish. However, after removing the varnish, the “finely displaced color modulations, the freely applied brushstrokes and the finger-smudged ‘pressures’ on partially scraped or scratched layers of paint” are visible again.

For two paintings by the Dresden painter Johann Carl Baehr, which came into the collections from private ownership in the 1960s, not only did the varnish have to be renewed, but the supports also had to be stabilized. Baehr painted on paper, which was later laminated onto fabric and glued onto a stretcher frame. Painting on paper directly in front of the subject of the picture was common practice among the Italian painters. “The typical traces of tacks in the corners of the paintings show that these small oil studies were painted on paper and usually mounted on cardboard, canvas or wooden panels sooner or later,” says Marlies Giebe. The damage was similar everywhere: tissue damage, tears, loss of paint layers, older retouching and distortion of the picture supports.

Strange colors

Even if the paintings with the Italian motifs tend to evoke a longing for the past, more and more artists were using the new, industrially produced colors around the middle of the 19th century. The difference to older paintings with classic color pigments after the restoration can be seen, for example, in the “Campagna Landscape” by Johann Jacob Frey, which Marlies Giebe attests to an “astonishingly bright and strange colorfulness”. “Sometimes even classic earth pigments were enhanced by the addition of synthetic colorants, it was called kindling,” says Giebe.

Frame restoration

The frame makers also made use of the new possibilities – not always with long-lasting results and not to the delight of the restorers. The Dresden restorers had to certify that 38 frames were in an unkempt condition and had suffered numerous cases of damage and improper reworking. This condition also has to do with the increased industrial series production. As the carving work was time-consuming, prefabricated stucco elements began to be applied to wooden profile strips and experiments were made with cheaper materials for the expensive gilding. The damage ranged from broken applications to oxidation of the metal overlays.

Visitors to the exhibition can no longer see any of this damage. However, Marlies Giebe describes the special features of the restoration work in detail in the parallel publication “Dresdner Kunstblätter”.

“Under Italian skies. 19th century Italian paintings between Lorrain, Turner and Böcklin”, Dresden Albertinum, February 10 to May 28

Publications

Andreas Dehmer/Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (ed.): Italian Landscape of Romanticism. Painting and Literature, Dresden 2016.

Andreas Dehmer and Heike Biedermann/Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (ed.): “Italienbilder zwischen Romantik und Realismus”, Dresden 2017, 39.80 euros.

Dresdener Kunstblätter, Volume 1/2017: Sehnsucht Italien, Sandstein Verlag, 5 euros.