This is a post for you, Rhoda and you probably know all this stuff, being the arty farty that you are, but inside the Seville Cathedral, they have all these massive works of art and slowly they are doing them up. These two images are firstly a painting that has been restored and cleaned and it hangs on the same wall as the second one that is yet to be worked on.
The lighting and photography is exactly the same and it goes to show what years of smoke, incense, dust, dirt and general grime can do to a canvas. I am going to take a punt that these paintings would be painted around the same time as the cathedral was built, but isn't it amazing to think those colours above lie beneath the murky smudge below.
They are also cleaning up the outside of the cathedral and apparently they use to water blast (or something similar), then they moved to chemical wash, but now they have decided it is too abrasive on the buildings, so they are doing something more gentle and you can see the result in the next two photos. All across this area, they are restoring things to how they would have looked, which I guess is fine, but I would not like to think they would make it look Disney new and lose the obvious age of things.
I guess they know what they are doing.
Wow, that looks amazing. I don’t think it will look Disney. It will s old after all, not pretending. Better to clean it up and get the acidic stuff off which eats into the material. The panting looks fantastic. Did they cover it up with something or is it all hanging open to the world?
ReplyDeleteIt appears to be open to the world, but some of them seem to have a perspex kind of shield and some have bars that cover up areas so that all the people cannot get into them.
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