The National Gallery has ruined Christmas. Or, to be more precise, it has had a very good go at wrecking one of the world’s greatest Nativity paintings. The fact that Piero della Francesca’s Nativity is back on view for the festive season, after a three-year restoration the London gallery vaunts as careful and revealing, should be glad tidings. But my joy turned to ash when I saw it. What in the name of God inspired the restorers to paint two completely new and distractingly moronic shepherd’s faces? Or a big white blob on the stable wall?
The Nativity, a mysterious and elusive work of haunting wonder, has been, oh so carefully and responsibly, rendered clumsy and plodding, if not downright comical. Almost every colour has been altered, every line re-emphasised. It’s like a garish digital reconstruction of what the painting may have looked like in 1475 when it was new – except, instead of offering this as a hypothetical, it has been physically repainted or, in the evasive language of restorers, “retouched”.
Piero painted this unique vision of Mary adoring her baby in front of a stable, accompanied by a choir of angels singing their hearts out, in his home town of Sansepolcro in Italy about 550 years ago. It has survived all that time, albeit with damage done long ago that erased the faces of two shepherds. None of that spoiled its mystery. Piero, a polymath who wrote books about maths and geometry, celebrated what he saw as the divine harmony of the physical universe in the choir of angels, with their mouths open in song. Influenced by the ancient Greek mathematical mystic Pythagoras, he connects the geometric, oval faces and tubular limbs of his people with the beauty of the angelic music he invites us to imagine. Try looking at it with Thomas Tallis in your ears.
Untune that string and what a chaos you make of this painting. Its pallor was part of its ethereal beauty. Now, the eye is drawn to a ruddy shepherd’s face painted by the restorer that covers a long-obliterated part of the picture. It is so awful it makes me think of the notorious amateur repainting of Christ’s features in a Spanish fresco that caused global hilarity a decade ago. The face of this red-hatted shepherd is, fortunately, done with more competence than “Monkey Christ” – and it’s based on scientific study.
Yet expertise without artistic soul has produced an idiotic botch. This orange-faced man looks vacant and gormless, even constipated, his barely human eyes unfocused and lifeless. It’s like he’s trying to remember where he parked the donkey. The rest of the face, too, is clumsily done, with coarse shadows that attempt to define the nose and cheeks. It’s like a pastiche of Renaissance art by a very cheap, very bad app. The adjacent curly haired shepherd, who points heavenwards, is barely any better. He looks like a very earnest teenager throwing shapes at a school disco.
The reason why it is such a scandal to fabricate faces in Piero’s Nativity is that he painted expressions with a grave psychological truth. I don’t believe for one second this restoration is true to the original. There simply isn’t a more moving image of a company of singers, joined in their song. Or a more human Madonna. Compare their expressions with the inchoate ones added to the shepherd and you immediately see the problem.
Paintings that are many centuries old need work over the years, and occasionally, where they are endangered, that has to be radical. But it is better to be cautious and minimal. The overriding priority is to preserve the artist’s own vision as purely as possible. Given that plenty had survived in this work to admire, the NG has shown astounding insensitivity to Piero’s magic.
The intervention seems to have been motivated by the National Gallery’s new interpretation of the picture. This, its researchers now believe, is an illustration of a vision that Saint Bridget of Sweden had on a pilgrimage to Bethlehem. “I saw a star,” she said, “but not the kind that shines in the sky; I saw a light, but not the kind that shines in this world.” To stress this idea of the star as a cosmic mystery, a patch of light on the stable wall, barely visible before, has now been crudely emphasised, turning it into a big white daub on grey stones. It is another lousy bit of painting. The dead-eyed, dancefloor shepherd, the National Gallery would have us believe, is pointing upwards to make sure we know this is holy light from heaven.
It’s a rather leaden piece of theological decoding. But fine, file it away with all the other theories about paintings that come and go. With an artist as enigmatic as Piero, these experts should know theirs is unlikely to be the last word – yet, with that daub of white, they have physically painted what ought to be just one possible interpretation right into the picture. The effect of the restoration is to pull us away from the simple human drama of the Nativity towards a more abstract and inhuman symbolism.
The NG says that, contrary to earlier theories that Piero never finished it, the Nativity is a fully completed work that happened to get badly damaged over the centuries. So they have made the entire painting more polished and complete, sharpening and deepening the blue of the Virgin’s robes, the grey of the stone stable, the smoothness of its roof. The angels too look more solid, but in a dodgy way that, in the firmed-up garments and feet, verges on pre-Raphaelite tackiness.
Yet it still seems unfinished. The empty ruggedness of the foreground is as raw as a Van Gogh garden, which seems to me a deliberate effect by the original artist – an early, daring instance of leaving art intentionally incomplete. In fact, it looks like someone has just rolled out a plain old rug. This touchingly ruinous Nativity, as broken down as the Bethlehem stable, has now been polished up as if it was for sale at Frieze Masters. The NG is not about to sell its Nativity but perhaps it believes, patronisingly, that visitors will respond better to a smooth and finished-looking work. I don’t agree and this isn’t what I want for Christmas.
