The New York Times
Recreating Adam, From Hundreds of Fragments, After the Fall
Slide Show | Adam Reborn at the Met A 500-year-old statue of Adam,
damaged in 2002 and since painstakingly restored, will go back on view
on Tuesday.
By CAROL VOGEL
November 8, 2014
It happened at 6 on a Sunday night. Adam – a strapping, 6-foot-3-inch
marble sculpture by the Venetian Renaissance master Tullio Lombardo –
fell to the ground on a patio at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
smashing into hundreds of pieces. “Nobody knew what had happened – it
could have been foul play,” said Jack Soultanian, a conservator who
was called to the museum that night in 2002.
An investigation revealed that Adam’s plywood pedestal had
buckled. “The head had come off,” Mr. Soultanian said. “There were 28
recognizable pieces and hundreds of smaller fragments,” he added, and
skid marks on the torso where it slid across the patio floor. Philippe
de Montebello, then the Met’s director, called it “about the worst
thing that could happen” to a museum.
What followed was more than a decade of painstaking restoration that
was unprecedented in the Met’s history. The project took so long there
were rumors that the statue was beyond repair. But it was not, as the
Met will make clear on Tuesday when the museum not only puts Adam on
display again but also releases videos of how Mr. Soultanian and his
colleague Carolyn Riccardelli – with dozens of scientists and
engineers – put the 500-year-old sculpture back together, relying on a
radical approach to the conservation. Along the way, it made a visit
to the hospital for CT scans. (Adam needed a nose job, as well as
head, hand, knee and foot operations.)
The restoration project serves as a watershed of sorts for the Met,
reflecting a new attitude adopted by museums around the world to share
such innovative work not just professionally but with the public. It
is a dramatic reversal from decades past when museum conservators
treated such efforts like state secrets, or subscribed to the belief
that revealing a work’s history of damage would make it less beautiful
to viewers. (Michele Marincola, a professor of conservation at New
York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, recalled that the legendary
conservator George L. Stout once compared discussing such restoration
work to inquiring “about the digestive system of an opera singer.” )
But today, “restoration is the cutting edge of art history,” said
Emilie Gordenker, director of the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in
The Hague, whose museum is also planning a major exhibition centering
on an in-depth restoration of a single painting, “Saul and David,”
which she described as riveting as a “crime scene investigation.”
Using the latest technology, the museum will chronicle the discoveries
of its creation and history – every unexpected detail that lurks
beneath the canvas, initially considered to be one of Rembrandt’s
finest but later de-attributed. “We live in a time when the public
wants to look behind the scenes and museums are finally becoming more
open about it,” Ms. Gordenker said.
Italy’s Uffizi Gallery in Florence, for example, had conservators
working in a glassed-in lab so visitors could watch the action. Right
now, in Belgium, Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s “Adoration of the Mystic
Lamb,” better known as the Ghent Altarpiece of 1432 – one of the
world’s most famous panel paintings – is undergoing a seven-year
restoration. Financing from the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles has
helped pay for it, including an interactive website showing the work
in minute detail. (The public can also visit the three sites in Ghent
where it is being restored.)
“This is a shift and I think a very important one,” Luke Syson, the
Met’s curator in charge of European sculpture and decorative arts,
said of this new tell-all era. With Adam, he added, “there’s no
pretending that the breaks aren’t there or that this didn’t
happen. Yes, this awful accident occurred on our watch and now we are
also responsible for its resurrection. Our processes need to be
transparent.”
In decades past, museums would have also restored a damaged work of
art in a way that got it back on view as quickly as possible. In the
case of a massive marble sculpture like Adam, conservators would have
resorted to using iron or steel pins that required drilling many of
the sculpture’s joints. But such invasive work can be risky, curators
said, potentially harming the marble.
Then there was the option, popular in the case of ancient sculptures,
of leaving masterworks unrestored if they cracked with age, excavation
or accidents – a process conservators often call “the romance of the
fragment.” That was the case with the Louvre’s headless “Winged
Victory of Samothrace” or its armless Aphrodite of Milos, better known
as the Venus de Milo. “There was a trend in conservation to take away
all restorations from ancient sculpture and get down to the original
fragment,” said Ms. Riccardelli, the Met conservator who led the work
on Adam. “But now we see the value of a Renaissance restoration.”
Nobody at the Met thought that the process would take 12 years. But
Mr. de Montebello said then, and reiterated in a recent interview,
that he wanted Adam “brought back to a state where only the
cognoscenti could tell anything had happened.”
“The aesthetic of Tullio is largely dependent on the high finish of
the piece,” he said. “To leave it in a broken state would have been to
choose its accident as its defining historical moment.”
The museum assembled a team of three conservators – Ms. Riccardelli,
Mr. Soultanian and Michael Morris, who works independently – along
with consulting scientists, engineers and curators. After Adam’s fall,
conservators studied in depth how Tullio had created it – with a head
of curly locks, a dreamy stare, leaning on a decorative tree trunk
intertwined with a serpent and a grapevine. The sculpture, which dates
from 1490-1495, was originally commissioned for the tomb of a Venetian
doge, Andrea Vendramin, and entered the museum’s collection in 1936.
Using a laser-mapping technology to create a three-dimensional
“virtual Adam,” the conservators and engineers were able to see the
places within the sculpture that would bear the most stress when it
was upright again. Fiberglass pins, an innovation in the field, tested
best for weight-bearing and safety, and in the end only three – one in
each ankle and one in his left knee – proved necessary to put Adam
back together. Everything else could be reassembled using a newly
developed, more pliable adhesive.
The last and final piece was the sculpture’s head, which was
reattached on April 1, 2013. Since then the entire sculpture has been
cleaned, with the holes where the marble had pulverized filled in and
colored to match the original stone.
When Adam goes back on view, some experts say its accident will make
it even more compelling to the public. “There’s the D.I.Y. factor,”
Patricia Rubin, the director of the Institute of Fine Arts,
said. “It’s something everyone can relate to. What happened to this
sculpture is a quandary you face each time you drop a piece of china
in your kitchen and see it smash on the floor.” Correction: November
9, 2014
An earlier version of this article misstated which knee of the
sculpture required a fiberglass pin. It was the left, not the right.