After
almost eighty years, serendipity led us to see the paintings of The Man with a Pretzel and The Fowler again, which were lost and
never seen in modern times. We knew them only from black-and-white
reproductions in Monumenta artis
Slovenicae II, France Stele’s overview of Slovenian art from 1938. Today,
both genre pictures, unique in the oeuvre of Fortunat Bergant, are on display
in the Permanent Collection of the National Gallery of Slovenia.
The
black-and-white photos gave false impression that the man holding a pretzel in
his hand had a skin disease. Examining The
Man with a Pretzel in person revealed that the black dots seen on
reproductions were not painted warts, but darkened retouches in places where
damage was treated. The canvas punctures that occurred in the distant past are
the result of vandalism. In the past, a painter or painter-restorer patched the
perforated canvas with drops of wax and retouched it by applying paint over it.
The treatment of these damages can be dated after 1850, due to the use of
pigments that were not available to painters before that time.
The
conservation-restoration intervention in 2017 was planned by an expert
commission.
Determining
what the “ideal state of the work of art” should be proved problematic, as
technical facts and scientific analysis does not reveal actual aesthetic values
that existed either at the time the painting was created or before or after any
of the later restorations of the picture. The “ideal state of the work of art” is
often just an assumption, an abstract idea realized on the basis of individual
knowledge and experience, and a consensus of diverse opinions within an expert
commission. In its most "pure form" it is manifested by the removal
of all materials that, in our personal and professional opinion, obscure the
ideal. Such an act is irreversible, because in addition to material
information, we also remove the aesthetic, technical, historical, educational
and emotional value of the work of art.
With The Man with a Pretzel, the expert
commission decided on the opposite concept of treatment, which accepts the work
of art "as is". Instead of removing the changed materials, we decided
to add minimal material with the purpose to improve the structural qualities
and aesthetic value of the work of art. We have preserved the condition of the
work of art that came into being in 1761, including with all the changes in the
original and added materials that occurred before 2017. Only the surface dirt
on the last coat of varnish was removed. We have preserved and supplemented the
changes that have occurred with aging only to the extent that we have supported
the original, structurally stabilized it and established an aesthetic whole. We
applied a new layer of retouches over the old retouches and overpaintings and
repaired the varnish locally. This approach requires a more thorough analysis
of the state of the work of art before the intervention and an intensive
dialogue within the expert commission, while the restoration itself requires
more creativity, cooperation, innovation, interdisciplinarity, knowledge and
technical expertise.
The picture
remains open to future interventions from both the material and ideological
standpoints. The added materials have a high degree of removability and would
not interfere with the removal of materials added in the past. However, we can
predict with great certainty that the painting will in some (perhaps not too
distant) future be considered within the concept of the “ideal state of the
work of art”.