(31 Jan 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Antwerp, Belgium – 28 January 2025
1. Pan to restoration of Peter Paul Rubens painting Enthroned Madonna Adored by Saints inside Antwerp Art Museum
2. Pan of restorers working on painting
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Koen Bulckens, Antwerp Art Museum curator:
++SOUNDBITE PARTLY OVERLAID BY SHOTS 1-2++
“There is no other place where we can take this work, we can through a special slot, lower it to the basement, but we cannot take it out of the building and we can bring it into this gallery, but we cannot really take it out. So this is why restoration happens right here."
4. Turning shot of restorers working on painting
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Koen Bulckens, Antwerp Art Museum curator:
++SOUNDBITE ENTIRELY OVERLAID BY SHOTS 4-8++
“We built a studio around the painting, yes. And we will use this studio now for the treatment of this work which is set to end in summer. And then we will work on another work."
6. Side view of framework in front of painting
7. Restorer working on painting
8. Close of restorer’s paint brush
9. Tilt up of painting
10. SOUNDBITE (English) Ellen Keppens, art conservator:
++SOUNDBITE PARTLY OVERLAID BY SHOTS 11-14++
“I think a good thing about Rubens his technique, his build up is so solid, so good. You always know that from a technical point of view (you) have a solid, a good painting. If then the painting is conserved in a kind of right way, you know, whatever you’re going to find underneath the varnish and the overpaint, it’s going to be of a really nice high quality and most of the time actually preserved really well because it’s technically so well built.”
11. Pan of painting border
12. High shot of restorers working on painting
13. Close pan down of painting
14. Restorers working on painting
STORYLINE:
When an iconic painting is in need of restoration, it is usually taken to a studio to be worked on in seclusion.
In the case of a massive Peter Paul Rubens masterpiece in the artist’s Belgian hometown, the studio had to be taken to the painting.
In the largest room of Antwerp’s Royal Fine Arts Museum, the restorers have the eyes of visitors on their backs.
At 6 meters (19.6 feet), the “Enthroned Madonna Adored by Saints,” a lush swirl of flesh, fabric and drapes, stands taller than an adult giraffe.
A team of six restorers is poring over it for a two-year cleanup, which is scheduled to end this fall.
Compare that to Rubens himself, who could put paint to canvas on such a massive work in only a few weeks.
No wonder such panache, the grand gesture in a simple brushstroke, left all in awe — then and now.
Rubens, perhaps Antwerp’s most famous son, painted the work in 1628 in the studio of his house in the city.
“I think a good thing about Rubens his technique, his build up is so solid, so good,” said Ellen Keppens. Together with her twin sister, Jill, Ellen is leading an international team of six women restorers.
On a recent morning, they were applying undertones to the Baroque masterpiece, sometimes crawling along the wood-paneled floor to apply a touch here or there.
Later, they had to crouch under a metal staircase before heading up to the top corner for another dab of retouching there. Who ever said art restoration was not physical labor?
She’d better not look too far to her left down the room known as the Rubens gallery.
At the other end stands another iconic work of the master, equally daunting and gigantic, and also badly in need of restoration: “The Adoration of the Magi.”
AP video shot by Mark Carlson
Production by Raf Casert
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