A 'Nativity' revelation

In routine X-ray at MFA, odd Renaissance work is found to reconfigure artist's earlier rendering of Jesus' crucifixion

Even scholars of the Renaissance painter Jacopo Tintoretto have been dismissive of his enormous "Nativity," which presides over the Koch Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts. They have viewed it as awkward, or - if they're being generous - "enigmatic" or "complex."

"It's off," said Frederick Ilchman, an assistant curator at the MFA. "It's a hodgepodge."

But it turns out that the painting was a lot more complex than anyone guessed. In the process of restoring it for an upcoming exhibition, the MFA made a surprising discovery. In the Renaissance equivalent of a cut-and-paste job, it appears that Tintoretto changed his mind about the subject, cut the original canvas to rearrange the pieces he didn't like, then - perhaps two decades later - painted over parts of the result to come up with an entirely new composition.

The painting that is now a horizontal nativity was once a vertical crucifixion.

"It's not uncommon to X-ray a painting and find a completely different subject underneath," said Ilchman, a specialist in the Italian Renaissance who is organizing the MFA show on the painters Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. "But cannibalizing your own picture is a very rare thing in European art."

Ilchman and others say that what they once deemed a second-rate painting is now looking a lot better in a new light.

Even an untrained eye can see there is something seriously amiss about the nearly 12-foot-wide painting, which was created around 1580. Densely composed and boldly colored, the work has large, muscular figures in the foreground, iconic religious imagery in the background, and a diverse menagerie of animals.

One principal figure, Saint Anne, a lavishly garbed woman presumed to be Mary's mother, is gazing in the direction of the serene baby, but she seems to look right past him to focus on a lamb, and she's flinging her arms out in dismay. A bearded shepherd behind her ignores the baby altogether - an odd element for a nativity - and is staring at some fixed point in the sky.

The crouching Virgin Mary, a luminous figure in a bright blue cloak, is out of scale for the painting: If she rose to her full height, she'd lurch right off the canvas. Her husband Joseph, by contrast, is flat and compressed. Also, portions of the surface are masterfully executed while others appear "more tentative and almost clumsy," Ilchman said, as though painted by someone in a hurry.

Yet neither Ilchman nor MFA paintings conservator Rhona MacBeth expected to find anything so dramatic a few months ago when six men hauled the hefty painting into the MFA's lead-lined X-ray room to scan it for restoration and technical analysis.

While they could see that the painting was composed of five canvases stitched together, it became clear with the first X-rays that the two outer sections - including a shepherd and Magi - had been painted at a later time in a different hand, possibly by workshop assistants. Then they noticed something peculiar in the layers of paint underneath the nativity scene. Beneath the elderly shepherd was a younger, beardless man, who may have been a saint. And hovering near his head was the bottom of an angel.

"The first eureka moment was finding that angel," said MacBeth. "It was like, 'Oh! what's that?" "

They also noticed that the middle piece of canvas was much darker than the others, "which didn't make sense at all, if everything had been painted at one time," MacBeth said. They zeroed in on the area around the Virgin, and according to MacBeth, "we really had a eureka moment."

As she was puzzling over the X-rays which she'd pieced together, George Shackelford, chairman of the MFA's Art of Europe department, happened to stop by. He noticed a pair of legs above the Virgin's head and something that appeared to be a vertical piece of wood.

"I said, 'This is about a crucifixion!' " Shackelford recalled.

"It was clearly taken from another painting, and from what appeared to be quite a finished painting," said MacBeth.

But which painting? Further X-rays revealed more surprises. The foot of an angel behind Virgin Mary. Puffy clouds painted beneath a rabbit, dog, and rooster. A whole other person, concealed beneath a tree, staring skyward just like the shepherd across the canvas.

"Now we knew that the shepherd who was in the nativity painting was really looking at Christ on the cross," said MacBeth. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place by manipulating digital images of the X-rays. MacBeth lifted out the middle section of the top painting - the compressed nativity scene - and pushed the remaining four panels together to create a different, self-contained tableau. In this one, the central figure was Christ - or at least the legs of Christ - apparently nailed to a cross.

"It was a very symmetrical composition," she said. The Virgin and her mother were now staring at Christ's feet, in dismay. The two saintlike men were flanked by adoring angels.

Why did Tintoretto alter his painting so radically? Ilchman has no shortage of theories. Perhaps his client abandoned the commission or refused to pay for it. Maybe the painting was finished but got damaged. Or maybe he wasn't satisfied with it but saw an opportunity later to make money by reconfiguring it, "hoping that a few existing figures could hold together a new picture which contained lots of additions by workshop assistants."

A big question remains, though: Where is the missing upper part of the original painting? "This," Ilchman acknowledged, "is a great mystery. But given Tintoretto's thrifty nature, I like to think that he didn't waste any canvas, and it's underneath some other painting, perhaps in a church in Venice."

He recently discussed the findings at a symposium at Columbia University, a discussion one attendee described as "overwhelming."

"What the museum has done is make this a much more interesting painting," said David Rosand, a professor of art history at Columbia. "It shows an economy of composition and a sense of invention that is really quite remarkable. Aside from introducing you to the economics of a Renaissance workshop, it gives you a very good sense of how the inventive minds works."

Ilchman is clearly delighted with the discovery, and not only because he's unearthed a whole new Tintoretto painting. In his mind, Tintoretto's work is misunderstood and underappreciated, and his image needs to be restored. He expects the new insights into "Nativity" to help: "It emerges as one of the major works by Tintoretto in North America, and it wasn't even on the list until now."

"Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice" opens at the MFA on March 15. The Tintoretto discovery has inspired the organizers to create a separate room dedicated to the technical examination of the paintings, including the "Nativity" X-rays that show the change of plans.

Afterward, "Nativity" will go back to its home in the Koch Gallery. But Ilchman thinks it should be "upgraded" to a spot, lower down, where it can be examined more carefully. "You can be sure we'll rewrite the label," he said.