A mastery of another kind: bringing the murals back to life
Gianfranco Pocobene has finished his work on the John Singer Sargent murals in the Boston Public Library.
Sargent himself never finished his part. He tackled them sporadically from the 1890s to 1919, when he gave up. The "Triumph of Religion" they're called, but the "Triumph" turned into a defeat for the artist, who made preliminary sketches for the culminating episode, "The Sermon on the Mount," but ultimately left the central panel on the east wall of the third floor BPL blank. Theories abound as to why.
As head of the conservation project that occupied 15 months of his life and that of half a dozen others from Harvard's Straus Center for Conservation, Pocobene sees himself as "one small part of the history of this complicated room."
Actually, he's brought the murals back to life. For decades, they slumbered, accumulating layers of grime and enduring clumsy conservation that literally white-washed some of the images into near-oblivion. Harsh fluorescent lighting in the space didn't help.
In their heyday, the murals were so influential that the Ladies' Home Journal recommended them as models for Christmas pageant costumes. By the mid-1900s, though, they were all but ignored. The period in which Sargent painted them saw the greatest upheaval in the history of art, a heady succession of "isms," none of which much affected Sargent.
Thanks to the careful cleaning and conservation by Pocobene and his team, plus the reopening of the long-blocked skylights and the restoration of the original lighting fixtures, viewers can now see the murals as no one has since Sargent abandoned them.
Sargent began his labor in an era dubbed the "American Renaissance," when, Pocobene says, "the people running this city were cultured, not like politicians nowadays." The people running the city in the late 19th century weren't necessarily the politicians, though; they were the great thinkers and creators.
Among them was Charles Follen McKim, chief architect of the BPL. In the spirit and style of Renaissance Italy, his design was a monument to enlightenment, a repository not only of great books but great art. The rarest of the rare books were kept on the library's third floor; the Sargent murals formed an anteroom to these riches.
McKim had carte blanche in choosing the BPL artists, and provided them the same carte blanche he enjoyed. Giving the artists this leeway is one thing that's not like the Italian Renaissance, when popes, princes and painters fought over the iconography of churches and palaces. Sargent was free to invent his own program -- and it was that very freedom that eventually soured the experience.
A life in conservation Pocobene, 47, was born in the country that was the cradle of the first Renaissance, in Sulmona, a little town east of Rome. His family emigrated to Canada when he was just a year old. "I got into conservation," he says, "because of going back to Italy as a teenager and a young man. There was always some conservation project going on in the churches."
After receiving a master's degree in conservation at Queen's University in Ontario, Pocobene embarked on a career that in 1989 brought him to Harvard, where he spent 15 years. In January, he became head of conservation at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
"The Gardner is kind of like here," he says, standing in the middle of the BPL's Sargent room. "You have to work in a given context. You can't do a super-duper cleaning because it would make the paintings jump out."
The tricky part of conserving the Sargents, he says, "was striking a balance between the murals, the reliefs, the frames, the bookcases, and the lighting. Sargent wanted it all to be seen as a single work."
Earlier restorations had thrown that balance out of whack. Sargent had laid an oil glaze over the gold background of the "Frieze of the Prophets" on the north wall. In a previous restoration, the glazing was removed, leaving the gold too shiny, too aggressive for a background. "Now we've coated it again," Pocobene says, "with a synthetic resin that can easily be removed." Reversibility is the watchword of contemporary conservators: Don't do anything that a future generation can't undo. One problem with the BPL Sargents is the sheer variety of media: paint, papier mache, metals, wood, glass, and a commercial wallcovering called Lincrusta-Walton, "which he used because it had a ribbed texture that would catch the light," the conservator says. "Sargent was very keen on lighting. He wanted the illumination from the skylights to animate the space, to change it with the time of day, the season, and the weather. Now that the skylights are uncovered, that's happening again."Another difficulty with Sargent," Pocobene says, "is that around 1900, the tradition of artists mixing their own paints died. They began using commercial pigments, with all sorts of things added to them." Generally, artists didn't know how these additives would alter the paint over time. The classic 20th century case is Harvard's 1962 Rothko series of paintings. The Abstract Expressionist master used red paint from a five-and-dime store: A decade later, it had turned blue.
A curious story The program Sargent devised for the murals is downright weird. The narrative is linear, but the way Sargent presents it isn't: One panel doesn't necessarily lead to the next in terms of the story.
Sargent begins with the pagans, who appear to be straight out of a Cecil B. DeMille epic. From then on, things are grim. The Israelites are oppressed; Christ is crucified; Hell, Judgment Day, and Heaven are all depicted. Among the most fascinating of the murals is the "Madonna of Sorrows," on the west wall. Sorrowful she may be, but she's also not exactly helpless. A fence of candles shields her. She holds an armful of swords and looks quite ready to attack.
Not religious in any conventional sense, Sargent believed in a secularized spirituality that he felt was suited to the Library's mission of self-education. Religion, to him, was personal. Organized religion had failed. Yet preparatory sketches for the nonexistent "Sermon on the Mount" show a human and humane Christ standing in a field, speaking to a spellbound crowd. The murals might have had a happy ending.
The two paintings flanking the empty panel where the "Sermon on the Mount" would have been are "Synagogue" and "Church." The pictures are unflattering both to Judaism and Christianity. "Synagogue" is an elderly woman, slouched over and blindfolded, her crown toppling from her head. Her posture is duplicated by Christ's. In traditional representations of the "Pieta," Mary tenderly cradles her dead son in her lap. In Sargent's "Church," Christ is slumped between her knees. She's not holding him; she's not even looking at him. Enthroned already, she stares straight out at the viewer, looking more like a Greek goddess than the meek Virgin.
It was 1919 when the two paintings were installed. World War I had left Sargent, who had been sent to the front as an official artist, profoundly disillusioned. Further disillusionment came with the negative reception met by "Synagogue" and "Church." When Sargent had begun his project, the separation of church and state and the suitability of religious paintings in a publicly funded building weren't hot topics. By 1919, they were.
Sargent intended the BPL murals to demonstrate that he was something more than a society portraitist. For most of the 20th century this was a back-burner issue because people couldn't really see them. Now that the newly cleaned and lit paintings are as close as they'll probably ever come to the originals, the 21st century can weigh in.
