Reuniting the lost sheep

March 21, 2017 6:46 AM

Using various techniques both traditional and digital, a 14th-century altarpiece that had been dismantled comes together again...including one lost panel
posted by PussKillian (5 comments total)

Amazing. So much detail and skill is revealed which is often lost to the modern viewer.
posted by Capt. Renault at 7:01 AM on March 21, 2017

This is what the digital Revolution was all about!
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:06 AM on March 21, 2017

I'd have preferred that they just showed the reconstruction for what it is, a contemporary pastiche. The innovation and skills are amazing, but it is really misleading, and that panel can have been completely different.
posted by mumimor at 8:30 AM on March 21, 2017

I'd have preferred that they just showed the reconstruction for what it is, a contemporary pastiche. The innovation and skills are amazing, but it is really misleading, and that panel can have been completely different.

I think the article was pretty honest about the effort to "'reconstruct' the lost panel" (quotes in the original). It's described as "a composition in Ghissi’s style" and "an imposter next to the real panels"

The small panels are all scenes from St. John the Evangelist based on The Golden Legend, a widely reproduced medieval account of saints' lives. The more detailed write-up [pdf] says:

Considering information from the life of St. John the Evangelist in the thirteenth-century Golden Legend, I believed the missing panel depicted St. John baptizing the high priest Aristodemus.

Deriving figures from those appearing in the other panels and based on other baptismal scenes by Ghissi’s teacher, Allegretto Nuzi, Caspers painted what she and I believed was a well-reasoned re-creation of the missing panel.

Yes, technically a pastiche, but a very focused one, to the point of being a plausible recreation.
posted by jedicus at 10:21 AM on March 21, 2017

The work will be on display at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon this year from March 25 through July 9:

"The Portland Art Museum is pleased to present an exhibition that brings together eight dispersed 14th-century paintings, and a recreated missing panel, so that the altarpiece can be seen and appreciated as one magnificent work of art. This reunion offers visitors a special opportunity to see the Museum’s Resurrection of Drusiana in its original context in the upper left corner. Donated by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in 1961, the painting is one of the finest Early Italian narrative scenes in the Pacific Northwest."
posted by A. Davey at 5:28 PM on March 21, 2017