The most current from Operation Night Watch– Rembrandt might have utilized lead-rich oil to prep his canvas and secure it from humidity.
Jennifer Ouellette – Dec 15, 2023 7:00 pm UTC
Expand/ Rembrandt’s The Night Watch went through lots of chemical and mechanical changes over the last 400 years.
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Rembrandt’s The Night Watchpainted in 1642, is the Dutch master’s biggest making it through painting, understood especially for its elegant usage of light and shadow. A brand-new X-ray imaging analysis of the work of art has actually exposed an unforeseen lead layer, maybe used as a protective step while preparing the canvas, according to a brand-new paper released in the journal Science Advances. The work became part of the Rijksmuseum’s continuous Operation Night Watch, the biggest multidisciplinary research study and preservation job for Rembrandt’s well-known painting, dedicated to its long-lasting conservation.
The popular scene illustrated in The Night Watch— formally called Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq— was not suggested to have actually happened in the evening. Rather, the dark look is the outcome of the build-up of dirt and varnish over 4 centuries, as the painting went through different sort of chemical and mechanical changes.
In 1715, The Night Watch was relocated to Amsterdam’s City Hall (now the Royal Palace on Dam Square). It was too big for the brand-new area, so the painting was cut on all 4 sides, and the cut pieces were never ever discovered (although in 2021, AI was utilized to re-create the initial complete painting). The goal of Operation Night Watch is to use a wide range of imaging and analytical methods to much better comprehend the products Rembrandt utilized to produce his work of art and how those products have actually altered with time.
As formerly reported, previous analyses of Rembrandt’s paintings determined lots of pigments the Dutch master utilized in his work, consisting of lead white, several ochres, bone black, vermilion, madder lake, azurite, ultramarine, yellow lake, and lead-tin yellow, to name a few. The artist hardly ever utilized pure blue or green pigments, with Belshazzar’s Feast being a noteworthy exception. (The Rembrandt Database is the very best resource for a detailed chronicling of the lots of various investigative reports.)
Previously this year, the scientists at Operation Night Watch discovered unusual traces of a substance called lead formate in the painting. They scanned about half a square meter of the painting’s surface area with X-ray powder diffraction mapping (to name a few techniques) and evaluated small pieces from the painting with synchrotron micro X-ray probes. This exposed the existence of the lead formates– unexpected in itself, however the group likewise determined those formates in locations where there was no lead pigment, white, or yellow. It’s possible that lead formates vanish relatively rapidly, which might describe why they have actually not been identified in paintings by the Dutch Masters previously. If that is the case, why didn’t the lead formate vanish in The Night Watch
