The Fourth Miracle Part 1 of 4 - Revealing The Catastrophe

This video is brought to you by Squarespace. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. We have in the studio today John and John, and clearly from New York. That's right, yeah. Welcome to Chicago. Thank you. I hope you feel like you're not making a compromise being in the second city. I love Chicago. I'm a very big fan. I actually went to school out in New York, so it's cool to have somebody from New York here in the studio. But you have brought with you our focus, this painting. So John, tell me who you are. John, tell me who you are, and then tell me what I'm looking at here. Well, you should certainly look at it as a symbol of New York, right? This is San Gennaro, patron saint of Naples and Little Italy in New York. I'm John Viola, and I'm here from two kind of institutions that we have in New York. One is the Italian American Podcast. The other is Red Sauce Studio in Little Italy, New York City. John is part of our team, and one of the things we do through the store and through the media that we create is to try to preserve stories and heirlooms of the Italian American experience. And this is one of them, because San Gennaro is the biggest feast in New York and means a great deal to a lot of people. So tell me a little bit more about that. You mentioned he's the patron saint of Naples and Little Italy, so he gets two for one. He's got a lot of coverage. Everywhere Neapolitans go around the world, San Gennaro goes with them. He's been the patron saint of Naples for the fourth century. Johnny's the real historian. He's known for the miracle of the liquefaction of his blood. You can see the ampule of his blood there. It still happens three times a year, and when it doesn't happen, it sort of does work out that an earthquake occurs. It didn't happen right before COVID. The last time before COVID, I was there. It didn't liquefy. Is there a crystal ball we can look into? I don't know. Every couple of months, they hold it up. It just liquefied. The pope just visited now. Yes, we are safe for now, until the next one. And this is a devotion that has made its way to Little Italy and communities of the southern Italian diaspora around the world. And particularly in our case, New York, Mulberry Street, what used to be one of the largest Little Italies in the world, the patron saint of Naples came with a huge chunk of the community being from Naples. The Church of Most Precious Blood, around the corner from us on Baxter Street, still has the National Shrine of San Gennaro, and out of that church emanates the annual feast of San Gennaro. Eleven days, and this year is the 100th anniversary. Wow. Okay, so to some degree, the way that Americans understand their Italian American heritage runs through Naples and San Gennaro. So there's really no way of separating San Gennaro from Italian American identity? I would say Neapolitan American. Okay. So the Italians from Napoli took this devotion wherever they landed. So now we see San Gennaro in California, we see San Gennaro in Vegas, we see San Gennaro upstate New York, Florida. Seattle as well, I think. San Gennaro has this feast, this festival, which is known all over the world. It's the largest in the country. Yeah. And I think that that's partially big too because, you know, obviously New York and its sort of center of the idea, and you have a universe, really, an idea of Italian America, right? And like, to me, the combination of Naples being the capital of Southern Italy and New York being the capital of Italian America, if I can say that, you know, it creates this sort of pan-Italian American identification with San Gennaro. I think it's safe to say he and Our Lady of Mont Carmel are the two sort of feast days that every Italian American at least kind of touches, if not celebrates. So you mentioned this is an 11-day feast, and this is the 100th anniversary of it. Boil it down to me, because as a non-Italian, as a non-New Yorker, I knew of this when I was in New York. I had friends that this was a big deal. We got to go home, we got this huge thing, and professors would say, oh, there's no class, we got to go home. And I'm here thinking, we've got to go home for it. It's a street festival. We have street festivals in Chicago, every single neighborhood, every single weekend. But nobody's going home not working because they got to go to the street festival. So why is this feast so important that it can stop daily lights? It's a big feast. It attracts a million people. Million people? Yeah. It's pandemonium. It's chaos. There's music, there's food, there's games, there's rides, there's just meeting your family and friends. Just socialize, have a good time. So it's a little bit like an Italian-American New York Mardi Gras. Yes. Everybody in New York has a piece of San Gennaro because it's been here so long, and it's in little Italy, lower Manhattan. So it's not like other feasts that occur in neighborhoods that are a little bit more out of the way. Brooklyn has the Giglio feast. It's fantastic, but it's Brooklyn. The Giglio in East Harlem, which used to be the biggest Italian community in the country, but it's out of the way. This is right in the heart of it. And there's more non-Italians there. So St. Rocco, it's our little society. You have the community, and that's that. San Gennaro, people from all over the world come and take part in it. It's almost like it's transcended San Gennaro and the Italian, the Neapolitan tradition. It's become bigger, maybe in the sense that it's now owned by all of New York, by maybe all of America. Yeah. Like the slice of New York-style pizza. It's that mutation from the original. We're going to fight if we're going to start over pizza. You can't argue that the Chicago is even approaching. You want me to work on your painting, right? I'm sorry, San Gennaro. I mean, he's the patron saint of Naples. It's got to be Neapolitan pizza for sure. So tell me about this actual painting, this portrait of San Gennaro, which I will say looks like maybe it was painted when he was alive, given how rough it is. Where did this come from? You know, this is embarrassing to say, because I'm a pretty devout collector. This is a weird online purchase that was not on any kind of organized auction site. I found it on a one-off website right before COVID, and I jumped and I bought it, and it was really reasonably priced. I kind of bought it sight unseen, and then COVID hit. I used to have my stuff delivered to my office, and I didn't see this thing in a box for years, and no record in the box just came in a box. I can't for the life of me, because it wasn't listed as San Gennaro. It was listed something like Neapolitan something, something. So I can tell you everything about it, except where I got it. I have no recollection, as embarrassing as it is. So it could have been made two weeks ago in Portobello Road, for all I know. It's almost like it's Kismet. It came to you for a reason. It did, yeah. And I think part of the reason it came to you is that then you would be a good steward and bring it to me, which is why it's here, and why it's here is because it is in rough shape. This painting has been through the wringer. Multiple rounds of conservation, multiple rounds of damage. You know, I think whoever worked on this painting in the past probably had the best of intentions and a comprehensive lack of technical expertise, which of course is what we see in dealing with old paintings. A lot of love, but not a lot of knowledge. So there are big issues with this painting, and some of them we can see right off the bat. It looks like it was torn in multiple places, kind of big, massive tears running through the piece. There's paint loss throughout. I mean, this whole bottom edge is missing. There's areas where the recreation and retouching is really rudimentary, really crude, and for a part of the painting that's so important, it just feels clunky. To say nothing of all of the grime and the old varnish that's on top of the painting, we made a couple of little tests. You can see right there a little idea of what's hiding underneath, but it will take quite a bit of work to get there. You know, we're gonna have to undo all of this stuff, then do a kind of a triage of what we have left, and then figure out how to put him back together. Are you saying it's gonna take a miracle? Well, as long as blood liquefies. He's got three of them a year, so maybe we got a shot. We have a good chance for it. But that's why, I mean, that's why we do this. We love these things. Working on priceless paintings is always fun because it's, you know, conceptually worth a jillion dollars. Or working on a super famous artist is really fun because, hey, I studied this guy when I was 19. But for me, for this studio, I think the things that really hit us are when we find a client who owns a painting, and there's an emotional bond between them and the painting, and the painting and something bigger. Maybe it's a family, maybe it's a community, a whole society. That's where art starts to transcend fetish object and starts to become part of our lives. And, you know, from everything you've told me about San Gennaro, about Little Italy in New York, about the Neapolitan tradition, and about yourself, you came to this painting. It feels like this is maybe a little bit bigger than just a painting. And, you know, I don't want to project too much, but it feels like maybe the weight that this painting is carrying is that of diaspora, of community, of a couple of guys, of more than just a painting. So, I'm excited for that. It makes me feel like when I'm working on the piece, it's not just for a dealer who's going to sell it, or a collector who's going to put it in their vault. That it's for somebody who's going to really enjoy it. It's going to have a meaning beyond, you know, the immediacy of who owns a painting, that it will reverberate. So, that's really cool from my perspective. I'm sure from your perspective, it's a little intimidating maybe to see it like this. No, you know, as I recall the sort of amazing mystery of how it even came to me in the first place, I agree with you. I think there's something special about it. And when we opened our store and studio last year around the feast, I brought it in and we just put it up on the wall. And I can't tell you, right, how many people from Italy, from all over Italian America, from people who have nothing to do with it at all, just kind of drawn into there's something very warm. And even though it's dark and damaged, I don't know, there's something attractive about the painting itself. And I got to watch, we got to watch the impact that it had on people in the store, you know. And so, I'm looking forward to a beautiful version of it having a greater impact. You know, I would be remiss if I didn't say it's going to be a lot of work. But we like that challenge. We're here for it. And it feels like maybe we're working for something bigger. So, we are excited to roll up our sleeves and see if we can't work a fourth miracle. Well, if anybody can do it, it's you guys. So. Well, while this painting may in fact need a miracle, not everything does. At least not your website, if you've got Squarespace. With thousands of beautifully designed templates that work everywhere and anywhere, Squarespace will have you looking good. And with their new fluid design technology, you can drag and drop elements around your website to change things up or customize it as you see fit without the need of any code. But that doesn't mean it's just a pretty website. Under the hood is massive technology. From search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, mailing lists, online scheduling, social media integration, shipping solutions, and more. Pretty much everything you need to run a successful business. Head over to squarespace.com slash Baumgartner for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code Baumgartner to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. The amount of work ahead of me for this painting is almost comical. But I'm going to approach it like I do every painting, one step at a time, piece by piece. After all, that's how you eat an elephant. And the first step is separating the painting from its stretcher support. And this painting has been lined, there are no original tacking edges left, and we are probably not going to reuse this support because it's warped and, well, for some other reasons that you'll find out later on. So I'm going to just simply cut off the painting from this support. You can see what I'm cutting here is just lining canvas and I don't need to save any of this. I'm not going to reuse it. I'm not going to reuse those tacks. And all I want is the original. So with a knife, it makes quick work of this otherwise really tedious process, which for most paintings is exactly what we have to do when we want to save the stretcher or we want to save the tacking edges. But this is a rare case. And it's good because it makes removing this painting really quite easy. Once it's cut, I can take a palette knife and slide through and then lift off the stretcher. And hopefully it doesn't stick and there are no tacks or frays that I missed. Every once in a while, I actually get this right on the first try. And just like that, the stretcher goes away. But now we have to start thinking about removing this lining. Now, I suspect that this lining is a rabbit skin glue lining. This is what my initial tests and examination reveal. And it feels like it. And if I'm lucky, I'll be able to just peel back this lining because the adhesive has failed. But this one is looking a little bit stiffer. It's not coming off easily when I peel it. So I think I'm going to have to take a different approach. And that begins by taking the painting back to the back half of the studio where I'm going to face it. And for this facing, because the adhesive used to line it is a water-based adhesive, rabbit skin glue, I'm going to be using a solvent-based adhesive to face this painting because I don't want the process of removing the lining to compromise the bond of the facing. Once that adhesive has been heated up and is flowing, I can roll it on the face of this painting. And I know that seems kind of wild, but keep in mind this painting is dirty. It has a lot of old varnish on it. And this adhesive can be removed. It's designed for conservation. So with it rolled on, I will then press the pieces of Japanese paper into the adhesive bed and seat them. And then I'll go over the entire thing with a little bit more adhesive, making sure there's good penetration and that this paper is very well bonded down to the surface of the painting because this is going to stabilize, support, and protect it. Once that facing has dried, I can come back with a little bit of water and see if that is in fact going to soften up this old adhesive. I'll paint a little section on and then just let the canvas absorb it, let the adhesive swell, soften, and then see if my initial assessments, my hunch, my sixth sense is correct. And after a few minutes, it does start to soften it. You can see it's much easier for me to peel this back. I know it doesn't look like it because I still have to use a lot of force, but this is much easier. But it's still hard work. And I can start to see the original canvas showing through, and that's always a good sign. So I'm going to continue on trying to peel this canvas back carefully and delicately so to not damage the original. But one thing that I notice is that there are two canvases here. The outer canvas has a looser and rougher weave, and then the inner canvas is much finer, almost like a muslin. And so I can separate them. And that is kind of a eureka moment because what it tells me is that there are two linings on this painting. And instead of trying to remove both of them at the same time, which really is a lot of work here, I'm going to remove the top one first and then remove the bottom one. Yes, it's a lot more work, but you know, this is what we have to do. And because there are two lining canvases and so much adhesive, I'm not using the laponite like I normally would. I'm using just free water. I need as much water to penetrate through this canvas as I can. I'll paint water on the top canvas, allow that to soak, peel it back, and then while the next section is soaking and softening, I'll paint some water on the muslin. And wait. And wait. And wait. It takes about 30 to 40 minutes to get one section of this soft enough that I can start to peel it back. And then it takes, oh, I don't know, 10 minutes to peel the section back. So we're looking at almost an hour to do one section here. And, well, there are lots and lots of sections. But this is the name of the game. Just working slowly, working methodically, and peeling back both of these layers. Now, eventually, once I have the original canvas exposed, I'll start to soften up the adhesive remaining on the original canvas. So you can see I'm working on one, two, three different sections at the same time. Because if any of this dries, it's going to be harder to get it off later. While the canvas and the adhesive is softening on the other part of the canvas, I'll come back with a palette knife and start to scrape off the swelled laponite, which is also removing some of the rabbit skin glue. Once I've scraped it, I can add a little bit more water. And then I'll come with a stiff nylon brush to remove it from the grooves and recesses of the canvas. This is a really loose and open canvas, and so I really need to work all of this adhesive out. But eventually, I do get it out, and I can come back with a cotton ball and remove the residue. And there we have the canvas, free of any adhesive. But boy, was that a lot of work. So I'll continue on, and on, and on. And you can see how I'm working in sections while other sections ahead of me are kind of softening up and being prepared for removal later on. I mentioned this takes a lot of time. This, just this section, was almost a full day's worth of work. Yeah, lots of work. I'll press the original canvas once I've gotten all of the adhesive off so that it doesn't distort. Because it's been exposed to water, it swells a little bit, and if I don't have weight on it with blotter paper, it will distort, and that could jeopardize the paint layer and also just make my life harder going forward. Finally, after days of work, I have removed all of the top lining canvas, all of the bottom lining canvas, and all of the rabbit skin glue. And what I'm finding is not great. There are lots of areas of patch that have got oil paint or adhesive or something on them, and all of these little spots need to come off because, well, they don't belong. This is sloppy work, and if we're going to save this painting, I have to remove them. And I'll do that by taking some laponite here on the assumption that these are water-based, and I'll kind of paste it on top. I want a nice thick coating, so I'll use a palette knife here. And I'm just going to let this laponite soften up what I think is a rabbit skin glue and gilders white mixture, kind of a thick paste adhesive. And it does, a bit. It does soften it up, but not completely, which leads me to believe that maybe there is some rosin or some linseed oil mixed in here. Effectively, this might be a soft flowing version of frame compo, and that's really impossible to remove. We can try everything, but the best we have is a sharp scalpel and scraping. And I am able to get some of it off, but not all of it, and not satisfactorily. And even when I can, what I find is that the canvas is just so deteriorated underneath. There's oftentimes no canvas, just shredded areas, and I can see the ground right through. And that might mean a reckoning. That doesn't sound good. It's not good. What's going on? Uh, well, a pretty big curveball. After removing both of the linings, which was our first curveball, of many that this painting has thrown at me and will continue to throw at me, I have come to the conclusion that this canvas is shot. Oh. It's, um... Well, yeah, like, what's going on here? You know, I think these are areas where the canvas was lost completely, and somebody put some fill in to kind of make up the difference between the canvas texture and where it wasn't. And you can see in some areas where there is no canvas, you just have the ground layer, but these are divots. So I think maybe to stabilize holes, they put some stuff on the back, but... Could we remove that? Well, I tried, and some of it came off and some of it didn't. And when it came off, what we were left with is areas of no canvas, just the ground layer, which, had we not faced the painting, would have been completely lost. So what are you thinking? Well, I didn't want to end up where I am ending up. I wanted to avoid where we are going at all costs, but after thinking about it, researching it, testing it, all other avenues have been exhausted, and I think the only thing that we can do is a paint film transfer. Wow. Okay. What does that entail? So right now we have the painting faced, and we have the paint layer, the ground layer, and then the canvas. We are going to remove this canvas from the ground layer and put a new support. So at a certain point, this painting will be held together by the facing, the paint, and the ground layer, and there will be no structural support. And we will be putting a new one on and discarding what is left of this support. That sounds really intense. It is really intense. It is a procedure that throughout history, maybe probably up until the late 80s, early 90s, conservators did, not routinely, but it was one of the tools in the conservators' toolkit. It has never been anything other than a very extreme procedure, a procedure of last resort, but when it was needed, it was needed. Is that where we are at? Last resort? That is where we are at. But it is extreme. I mean, we are taking off the original canvas, leaving the painting completely vulnerable, and then putting it onto a new structural support. And that is really extreme. And like I said, it is not where I wanted to end up. But at a certain point, when all of the other tools that exist are falling short, the most extreme tool kind of has to be brought back into the fold and evaluated. And so that is, I think, what we are going to do. If we are not able to do this extreme treatment, what would the fate of this painting be? That is really what it comes down to. We could try to line it with a soft lining, like we have done in the past, but this canvas is so threadbare and so deteriorated, and has so many divots and chunks missing. That we cannot remove. That we cannot remove, right. And has a very big textural difference, that all of those textural differences would telegraph to the front of the painting. Not to mention, it is like torn throughout itself in many places, so a soft lining is not necessarily going to give it enough structural support. So then we elevate it to an interleaf lining, which we have done plenty of, when we need to, and when the canvas is really gone. But again, the textural issues that we have with this canvas, those again would telegraph to the front. So trying to keep this original canvas, which provides absolutely no structural stability to this painting, it is not helping at all. If we try to keep this, it may in fact become problematic for the painting in the future. So Ali, you have been here like a year plus with your internship. This is probably the most radical procedure that probably you will ever see. Yeah. I have done this maybe I think three times in the past almost 30 years. So like once a decade, a painting comes along that meets all of the requirements. Yeah. I mean, it is the most radical treatment that I know of. And in school, we did some mock-ups and talked about it in a theoretical sense. But my understanding was that because of the risk, it is not really carried out much more. Yeah. I mean, that is an interesting idea. Risk is something that I think has a front end and a back end. The risk in executing the procedure is always there no matter what we do. And this one has an elevated risk because we are taking the structural support off and then we have just the paint layer. But it is not fundamentally any more risky than bringing a laser or a solvent gel or a scalpel to the surface of the painting. When managed appropriately, the risk is contained. I think there is a big misconception about the risk of stability afterwards. And many institutions, many museums have evaluated paint film transfer paintings. And I think the Tate looked at a suite of paintings that were subject to a flood. I think they were underwater for 72 hours or so. And they found that the paint film transfer paintings were not only as stable as regular paintings, but more stable. That they survived the submersion in water and the drying process better than the other ones. So within conservation, it is controversial not because it has a high failure rate. In fact, it does not have a high failure rate. Paint film transfers are incredibly stable throughout history. It is controversial because we are taking some of the original material and it is going to be lost. Right. But isn't that a little bit inevitable in any procedure? 100%. But that is some of the hypocrisy in modern conservation. The canvas tells us a historical accounting of the piece. It has data about when it was created. And as part of the construction of the object, it needs to be respected. The problem with that is that it is somewhat hypocritical and contradictory to how conservation is practiced. Old tacks and staples are removed and discarded when they are rusted and broken. Stretchers, when they are no longer able to be salvaged and repaired, are replaced with supports that are adequate. Even original varnishes are removed when they have started to discolor or negatively affect the appearance of painting. So throughout the practice of conservation, we are very okay removing and discarding original elements when they no longer serve a structural purpose, when they affect the viewer's ability to appreciate the object or see the artist's intent, or when they are problematic going forward. But for some reason, removing this canvas is a line that somehow was etched in the sand and this treatment is now considered verboten, which is problematic in a lot of ways. One, it's hypocritical. This canvas is now an impediment to the future of this painting. And two, there's no research. We have a void. When conservators decided that this was not a procedure to do anymore, they stopped doing it. And so there's no historical research. So we have this massive gap where we now have a procedure that, though it may be considered extreme, is of value in extreme cases, but we don't have any modern data on that. So, I mean, my head has trouble wrapping around that that hypocrisy, but I guess that's what modern conservation is. Do not intervene because that's extreme, but how are we supposed to save things? And I think that's something that conservators all over the world struggle with. What's the right approach? How do we do it respectfully and sensitively? And how do we find justification for these things, particularly in the context of the community? Because I'm sure that the backseat drivers will have plenty to say about this procedure, but the reality is that this is not something that has been come to lightly. You know, I've been hemming and hawing and thinking about this for weeks and doing so much research on this, that I don't see another way to save this painting while keeping this support on the canvas. Now, that's not to say that I'm not going to try to save as much of the original canvas as possible and keep it with the painting, because if it does provide historical information, it can still be referenced. But in order to make the painting a painting and stable, this canvas has to go. Okay, so I think you've made it clear that this canvas needs to go, but that leaves us with the questions of how are you going to remove it and what are the next steps structurally for this painting? That's the question. I have put together an approach that I think will be satisfactory for the painting, but also respect the requirements that it be reversible, so that in the future if it ever needs to come off, it can, but it's gonna be pretty complicated. And I would be lying if I said that it doesn't carry risk, but that's what you do. When you come to a fork in the road, you take it. Well, that escalated quickly. This is not what I expected to do. This is not what I wanted to do, but this is what I have to do. And in order to do this incredibly complicated, incredibly difficult, and really risky procedure, I first need to take off this facing. And that's done by saturating the paper and the adhesive with a solvent. And this solvent won't harm the painting. It's a solvent that really isn't used in art making or conservation, really outside of this adhesive. And that's by design. So once the paper is saturated, the glue will absorb that solvent, it will swell, and it will become soft. Much like the rabbit skin glue, but here we're using a petro solvent instead of water. And you can see I'll peel back this facing and no paint has been lost. There is a fine residue of old adhesive on the face and I will remove that, but really what we were looking for is making sure that the painting is stable and all of the paint is stuck on the canvas, not on the facing. It's pretty satisfying to remove this and find that the only thing that's coming off is some of the surface grime and the paper. That's a well done facing. And then I'll take the same solvent and I'll start going over the face of the painting to remove the residue of the adhesive. And again, nothing is coming off here except for the old adhesive. Maybe a little bit of the surface grime that the adhesive is stuck to, which is a nice way of kind of getting a little bit of help for the cleaning. So on we go. And then next time, I'm going to have to tackle how I'm going to remove this canvas from this painting and initiate the paint film transfer. So come on back to see how that all unfolds.