Two Paintings by Bronzino. Restoration Completed

Visitors will be able to see The Flaying of Marsyas and a Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici, both painted by Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572), a native of Florence and prominent exponent of Mannerism.

In 1865, four paintings were acquired for the Imperial Hermitage from the collection of Count Antonio Litta, including The Flaying of Marsyas that was then considered to be by Correggio. With time, however, scholars began to doubt the correctness of that attribution. In the early 20th century, the German art historian Hermann Voss determined that the real creator of The Flaying of Marsyas was Agnolo Bronzino. He cited the 16th-century biographer Giorgio Vasari, who on two occasions states that when working in Pesaro (1530–32) Bronzino remained longer than he had intended and painted a harpsichord chest for the Duke of Urbino. Vasari did not name the subject of that work, but Voss found a mention of it in another 16th-century source. Furthermore, the Louvre possesses two preparatory drawings by Bronzino for the figures of Marsyas and Midas, testifying to how meticulously the master worked on his creation.

The painter drew upon a story related by the Roman poet Ovid. Once, while playing the flute, the goddess Athena observed how badly it distorted her divinely beautiful face. Infuriated, the daughter of Zeus flung the flute aside, pronouncing: “May whoever picks it up be cruelly punished!” The instrument was found by the shepherd Marsyas, who knew nothing of the curse. He picked up the flute and soon taught himself to play it so well that everyone listened to his playing with rapt attention. Marsyas grew proud and challenged the patron god of music, Apollo himself, to a contest. King Midas was invited to judge the duel and ended by naming Marsyas the winner. Both mortals paid for their audacity: Apollo strung Marsyas up from a tall pine and flayed him alive, while Midas was awarded donkey’s ears for his judgement.

In the painting, we see several episodes from the myth at once. Within a landscape, at the base of a rock on the right, a naked Midas and Athena in a pink tunic sit listening to Marsyas playing on the flute and Apollo on the fiddle. In the centre, Marsyas is lying on the ground with the skin already stripped from his legs, while Apollo is holding him by the ear and brandishing the knife in front of him. On the left, Midas’s servant is lying on the ground, entrusting the secret about his master’s ears to the reeds, while further back Apollo is “awarding” Midas the donkey’s ears watched by Athena.

Over its centuries-long history, this painting has undergone many changes. Originally it was executed on a wooden support and had the shape of an irregular hexagon, wider towards the right-hand edge. This peculiarity was dictated by the design of the lid of the musical instrument that the painting was made to adorn. Later, the shape of the picture was altered to a rectangle. Immediately after entering the Imperial Hermitage, the work was transferred from panel to canvas. Before the restoration carried out in 2016–20, the artist’s own painting was concealed beneath a thick layer of yellowed varnishes and darkened areas of restoration overpainting that considerably distorted the perception of its original colour scheme, disrupting the harmony in the handling of colour and tone. It was difficult to make out the details or the succession of foreground, middle ground and background characteristic of Bronzino’s art.

In the course of restoration, the Hermitage’s specialists removed the excess layers of darkened varnish that had already lost its aesthetic and protective functions – revealing the painting’s rich palette of cool hues. The original scenes were also freed from overpainting. On the left, in the mouth of the dry river, a genre scene became visible: two personages, a little house and a view receding into the blue distance. In the centre, there is an urban landscape and a broad strip of azure sky. Apollo’s head, depicted in profile, now presents, as the artist intended, a clear-cut expressive silhouette set off by the bright sky. To the right of the heap of stones behind Midas’s back, there is a depiction of a sailing vessel slipping through smooth water, a cloudy sky and the line of the horizon.

The portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici also featured in the exhibition bore little resemblance to a work by Agnolo Bronzino. In 1533, the Florentine became court painter to the Medici family. He became part of the close circle of intellectuals, men of letters and artists that Cosimo I gathered around him. During his stay in Rome in 1546–47, Bronzino became acquainted with Michelangelo’s oeuvre and learnt much from it. Bronzino painted frescoes, altarpieces and paintings on religious and allegorical, as well as mythological subjects. He made his name, however, primarily with his portraits, creating a new type of formal depiction. In all his works, the figure is cut off at the knees. Bronzino’s models are human masks, mannequins of a sort with idealized faces, gazing haughtily out at the viewer.

All of this applies to the portrait of Cosimo I, but the large number of later coats of yellowed varnish and the loss of the original wooden support after the work was transferred to canvas hampered the perception of Bronzino’s original painting. In 2019–20, the study and restoration of the painting was carried out in the Hermitage. Upon examining the canvas under infrared light, the restorers made some interesting discoveries. Beneath the depiction of the head, a graphite sketch appeared that made it possible to imagine the process by which the artist created the image. On the slope of the mountain seen through the window behind the Grand Duke’s back some features appeared that resembled three little figures. The restorers discovered that two of them are a depiction of a naked woman with wings and a naked man crawling towards her. The third little figure, visible only in the infrared spectrum, is a trace of the artist’s compositional experimentation. The removal of the excess layers of yellow varnish revealed on the Grand Duke’s clothing not only the delicate working up of the details of the embroidered patterned, but also a difference in colour between the jacket shot with blue and the smoky violet breeches.

At the final stage of the restoration, the numerous old losses of the artist’s original paint layer were tinted within the boundaries of the damage, which helps the viewer to gain a coherent impression of the Hermitage portrait by Agnolo Bronzino. After the restoration, the composition devised by the artist comes across far more convincingly. The illuminated part of the depiction of the windowsill was revealed as well as the continuation of the wall, while the tiny figures invisible before the restoration have enlivened the depiction of the mountain. The silhouette of Cosimo’s right forearm, which had been obscured by overpainting, emerged in contrast, forming an expressive diagonal within the painting.

The exhibition curator is Tatiana Kirillovna Kustodieva, Candidate of Art Studies, leading researcher in the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art.

The restoration work was carried out by Maria Viacheslavovna Shulepova and Maxim Vadimovich Lapshin, artist restorers in the Laboratory for the Scientific Restoration of Easel Paintings, part of the State Hermitage’s Department for Restoration and Conservation.

An illustrated brochure in Russian (State Hermitage Publishing House, 2020) has been prepared for the exhibition. The text was written by Tatiana Kustodieva, Maria Shulepova and Maxim Lapshin.