The Brooklyn Rail

The Irving Sandler Essay Series
Edited by Alexander Nagel

This essay series, generously supported by an anonymous donor, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about? A space apart from the press of current events, the Sandler Essay invites artists and writers to reflect on what matters to them now, whether it is current or not, giving a chance for an “oblique contemporary” to come in view.

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In 2020, a meme began to circulate about the remarkable physical transformation of a forty-year-old stuffed animal, now known as the Well-Loved Garfield.¹ Squeezed and worn, this used toy also, by chance, seemed to have closed its eyes. Abrasions have almost completely eroded away the black and white coatings that gave the Garfield its gaze.² But because the product designers chose to layer the pupils and eye whites on top of the same orange used for the eyelids, this wear doesn’t resemble damage at all. Instead, Garfield looks as if he has entered a restful reverie, radiant from decades of snuggles well-received. Thousands of viewers responded (and continue to respond) to this aged Garfield. At least one person got a tattoo of the plush, with the caption “To be loved is to be changed.”

This is quite a different vision of change than can normally be found in a museum, where the cultural value and meaning of a collection object usually has to do with how little it has changed over time, not how much. Even when museums change tack to center stories of transformation instead, (as is becoming more common thanks to growing interest in “object afterlives”) these exceptions usually feature irreversible, radical acts of recycling—for example, the lapis lazuli head of a Roman empress reused as a head of Christ, or the parchments of Old French love poetry which became the substructure of a bishop’s hat.³

The Well-Loved Garfield is something else entirely. It does not resemble the plump, awake cat its designers intended it to be. But neither has it been transmuted into a different kind of thing, like the lapis empress-into-Christ or the poetry-into-hat. Since Garfield is an animated cartoon of a living animal, it makes narrative sense that his eyes might be able to close—many other images of Garfield with closed eyes exist, and after all, cats do close their eyes in response to cuddles. The plush was conceptually open to this change. And it was materially open as well, since the physical way the eyes had been built—with white and black layered over orange—was what created the possibility for abrasion to resemble the movement of eyelids. The marvelous Garfield seems less like an inert thing passively receiving external forces, and more like it has itself become alive, and is participating in its own development.

Is the Well-Loved Garfield a one-off, the only example of such an extraordinary, almost animistic trajectory? Could another kind of object, even a painting, also exist in this extendable way, open to being changed and developed beyond the direct approval of its maker? As a painting conservator, I think these questions are important to ask. If unexpected change can continue (rather than diminish) a painting’s authenticity, even beyond its author’s end, such a possibility lets us reimagine what “author” can mean when it comes to painting, as well as what “conservator” can mean. And this exercise is more than an imaginative one—it also has a basis in historical reality.

In 1993, the Getty Museum decided to purchase a fourteenth-century gold-ground painting, with one caveat: the acquisition was contingent upon the removal of a large painted baby from the work’s surface, which had been added by a later artist.⁴ The painting in question is attributed to the Florentine artist Bernardo Daddi and dated to near 1335. It shows two saints flanking the sides of a central Madonna figure, who stands behind a parapet and reaches her hand out towards the mortal world outside the work’s edges. About a century and a half after Daddi’s death, an artist working in the late 1400s or early 1500s painted a baby into Daddi’s aged composition, beneath the central Madonna’s outstretched hand, as if to receive her gesture of care.

Removing this baby meant permanently destroying centuries-old paint. But from a different perspective, the addition was itself destructive, a “scar on the surface” of Daddi’s otherwise unusually well-preserved artwork, as one Getty conservator put it. ⁵ And so, in order to recover a version of the painting closer to Daddi’s “original,” the baby was permanently “cleaned” off.

But had the Getty’s new painting ever been “original” to Daddi? In Florence and Rome, there are two other paintings which show the same central Madonna figure as the painting the Getty acquired. In the Florence version, this Madonna holds an inscription identifying her as the “Virgin of Bagnolo,”—a now-lost, miracle-working icon. In other words, the Getty painting was not a standalone work, but one edition of a series based on the Virgin of Bagnolo that was created by Daddi together with his workshop. These three Madonnas are both artworks in their own right, and also representations of a now-missing holy object, which had itself been made by a different artist, at an earlier moment in time.

In the series of images to which the Getty painting belongs, the boundaries where the real world ended, and the painted world of the Virgin of Bagnolo began, were to a certain degree permeable (like the paintings’ authorship). Each of the three Madonnas reaches her right hand past the parapet that pictorially separates the deity from the viewer. In the Getty version, the space below that outstretched hand was originally left empty, but in the Florence version it is occupied by two small painted supplicants, who pray before her image. Daddi integrated these supplicants into his compositional template on the request of his client. But there is also a kind of verisimilitude to this customization. Just as real people would visit the Virgin of Bagnolo to pray, and then leave when finished, painted versions of devout visitors appear and disappear from Daddi’s painted renditions of this miraculous icon.

One kind of person who might be brought before a miracle-working painting was an ill baby. This was likely also why the added baby was integrated into Daddi’s work: as a votive offering, commissioned in hope or in thanks for the Madonna’s help in healing this child’s sickness.⁶ And the figures Daddi himself painted beneath the outstretched hand of the Florentine version are also votaries. ⁷ Like the baby, they too are there to bid for grace by becoming decorously painted into the Virgin of Bagnolo’s plane of reality.

Both Daddi and the later artist who added the baby created testaments to the possibility of this particular Madonna’s ability to intercede in human life. There is a meaningful continuity between Daddi, who quilted together a generalized Madonna image with various individualized appeals from his clients in the mortal realm, and the nameless intervening artist who, several generations later, symmetrically coupled Daddi’s same image with the now-lost painted baby. Said another way: the addition of the baby around 1500 replays the same generative pattern Daddi had used to create his versions of the Virgin of Bagnolo in the 1330s.

And apart from echoing Daddi’s original actions, the added baby also had a reparative quality. Its appearance may have restored a lapsed sense of this Madonna’s spiritual efficacy, forgotten or eroded as the first generations of her beneficiaries disappeared, and the painting’s materials aged. And, at the same time, the baby seems to have acted as a physical repair, advantageously covering up heat damage to the original paint caused by a candle burn. ⁸

The baby addition’s impressive multi-sidedness (at once a repair and a recapitulation of Daddi’s production process) was not unique. Over time, it was not only that premodern Italian paintings could be damaged by candles, covered in dirt, etc. These works were often bespoke and site-specific objects that the artist had designed to visually and narratively resonate with their clients’ individual situations and with the work’s planned surroundings. And so, alongside gradually shifting away from their original physical states, such paintings also always lost these original resonances, as a new generation inevitably inherited them, and many were displaced into new or renovated settings. At least six other paintings attributed to Daddi were reshaped and given new imagery (not always babies, but saints, angels, adornments) a century or so after they were made, in interventions that restored their eroded site-specificity at the same time as renewing their relevance to their living custodians. In several of these cases (if not all), the added materials also covered up worn, damaged surfaces.⁹

Today, significant cultural and financial value is attached to the idea of an isolated artist-author who makes unprecedented creations by themselves—and, by extension, the idea that the end of a painting cannot extend past the end of its painter. Here we have quite a different situation. In premodern Italy, painters did not begin from a proverbial “blank slate.” Like his contemporaries (and predecessors, and successors) Daddi built his paintings through strategic conversation with admired pre-existing images, like the Virgin of Bagnolo. Just as the Well-Loved Garfield is far from the only representation of Garfield, Daddi’s Madonnas were created alongside many other Madonnas. In other words, Daddi (and Duccio, and Giotto, and painters all the way through Raphael) did not exist or work alone, but within a hugely productive workshop-based ecosystem that both preceded and outlasted him, and that was built into the structure and subject of his works. What the added baby reveals is how these conditions of creation can allow the objects produced within them to lead more expansive existences than one might expect—to both begin before, and end after, the time in a given artist’s studio when they were made.

In spite of the outward emphasis on individual authorship in the modern art world, it remains true that many recently canonized artists did not work alone either. This is not limited to artists for whom delegation was part of their conceptual strategy, like Donald Judd or Sol LeWitt, but also includes, in their own ways, other famous figures, like Robert Rauschenberg, or Ellsworth Kelly, or Richard Serra. Legally these individuals were the sole authors of their works, but they were also the centers of their own ecosystems (comprising, for example, studio assistants, framers, family members, conservators, etc.), which they each managed in different ways.

These ecosystems can complicate the cut-off point of when an artist’s practice truly “ends.” The death of such an artist means that the author is gone in a legal sense. But even so, echoes of the artist’s life may still reverberate, as knowledge of their system of production does not necessarily just disappear. And these echoes have implications for the conservation studio. The expertise of individuals intimately involved in the how and why of an artist’s creative process can help conservators make decisions which have a greater claim to authenticity—by virtue of tapping into a source straight from the “original” context in which the work was made—than the decisions that will someday be made about those same works thousands of years from now. And accordingly, a wonderful infrastructure of archival information has grown to record for posterity the memories of not only artists, but also their varied collaborators.¹⁰

Can the respect and attention that is given to the expert knowledge of materials and intentions held by Richard Serra’s surviving collaborators (to take one example) also be extended to the artistic ecosystems of the past? No analogous archival infrastructure exists for premodern Italian paintings, even though the added baby is only one of many known interventions. The ways that premodern works were altered and kept by their earliest generations of stewards aren’t seen as relevant to their present-day maintenance, and can appear antithetical to the aims of conservation, as demonstrated by what happened at the Getty. But the painter who created the baby, and the patrons who commissioned this addition, were operating in a context much nearer to Daddi’s own than ours is today. Daddi’s life may have ended in 1348, but the tradition of Italian religious panel-painting production this artist belonged to continued unbroken well past this date, as the symmetries between the added baby and Daddi’s original process demonstrate.

In the present day, public perceptions of art conservation tend to be haunted by misleading analogies to medicine. Since conservators often suppress visual signs of neglect and accident, the elective decisions we enact can easily be mistaken as ministering to the “health” of artworks. But what counts as “healed,” and what counts as “damage,” are often neither concrete nor constant judgments when it comes to a painting. Separating injury from acceptable change can be a much more dynamic art than a medical diagnosis. The Daddi’s secular late twentieth-century custodians at the Getty clearly did not define “scar” in the same way as the same painting’s sixteenth-century religious stewards, who may well have considered a Madonna triptych with recent proof of devotional investment to be much better-preserved than a painting of the same subject untouched since its making. It’s not only for Garfields that being loved can mean being changed. In one story from fifteenth-century Florence, a parish priest decides to let a painted saint be destroyed during his church’s renovation, not because it was in bad condition materially, but because he had never seen anyone light a candle in front of it.¹¹

Upkeep is more relative than it may seem. As the British anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote, even dirt is most accurately defined not through hygienic measurements, but as “matter out of place.”¹² Cleaning boulders in a forest, as the artist Carmen Perrin did in 1991, is an artistic act; cleaning the inside of a house is maintenance. What is dirt, and what isn’t, depends on a contingent understanding of what is appropriate to a given setting. If we take for granted that an object’s condition can be evaluated with knowledge only of its material and not of its context, of how and why and for whom it was made, then even the Well-Loved Garfield’s worn-closed eyes could be misunderstood as paint loss, and its open eyes reconstructed.

Of course, a mass-produced stuffed animal is different from a painting. The Well-Loved Garfield has the ability to coexist alongside its many alternate versions. The meme’s emotional impact depends not only on the worn toy, but on the new one sitting next to it. Had Daddi’s Madonna been made in a more reproducible medium than painting, like a book, it could have been re-issued in two “editions,” and existed both with the baby and without. Andrea Rothe, the Getty conservator who removed the baby, later reflected that he never felt convinced they had made the right decision.¹³ If Rothe had been able to magically re-edition the Madonna instead, he would have. But conservators are no more art’s editors than art’s doctors.

When the ending of a painting is up for debate, and multiple irreconcilable states compete, a choice may have to be made between these authenticities. Like an artwork itself, such a decision will be dimensional, capable of being interpreted in more than one way, and also expressive, sensitively reflecting the complex desires and cultural conditions in which it is made. And the effect of this choice will be to cause and compensate for loss at the same time.