ACCADEMIA WOMEN: VIOLANTE 2025. Before and after

Conservator recounts Violante Siriès’ restoration

By Elizabeth Wicks

This article was originally published in Restoration Conversations magazine

Issue 7, Spring 2025

Reading Madonna, before and after restoration, ph. Ottaviano Caruso

In 1770 Violante Siriès became the first woman artist allowed to copy works at the Uffizi Gallery. Of all the possibilities there were to choose from, Siriès picked a small painting on copper by Venetian master Francesco Trevisani, The Madonna Sewing. It must have been an image close to Violante’s heart because, several decades earlier, she had painted the Virgin Mary with a sewing cushion and needlework by her side, for the Carthusian Monastery in Galluzzo, just outside of Florence. In Siriès’ Reading Madonna, the Virgin Mary is gazing down at an open book placed on a table, or to be more precise, she is praying, because the large volume, with its first three lines in Hebrew script, is obviously a prayer book.

The Madonna’s hands are clasped as she tilts her head downwards in meditation. Lying under the book is the Virgin’s sewing cushion, with a piece of white embroidery, needles and thread. She appears to have just set down her work to pray. The painting is a clear depiction of the monastic ideal: prayer and work. The monks’ active and contemplative life is personified in this site-specific picture, created as the altarpiece for the Prior’s private chapel. The image of Mary alone and engaged in prayer is an unusual one. But above her head, on the frescoed ceiling of the chapel vault, is a dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit and the annunciation of the birth of Christ.

The Prior’s Chapel was frescoed in the 1600s by Bernardino Poccetti, and then modernized in the mid-eighteenth-century Rococo style with gilded stucco work by Sebastiano Salvini, fresco decoration in delicate hues by Bartolomeo Nesi, and three paintings on canvas. The two smaller oval paintings on the side walls of the Chapel were created specifically for the space, just like the Reading Madonna. They depict the early Christian martyrs Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Agnes. Catherine is identifiable by her crown and the wheel of her martyrdom behind her, while Agnes holds a lamb and the martyr’s palm branch. Both saints are also depicted in the cycle of Della Robbia’s glazed terracotta busts, which decorate the Large Cloister adjacent to the Prior’s private apartments. Saint Catherine of Alexandria was a famed scholar and orator, while Saint Agnes was known for her great piety – both are fitting counterpoints to the Reading Madonna.

The restoration and study of the paintings was our focus, as part of the Accademia Women project, and our conservation process comprised the active and the contemplative values inspired by the paintings’ monastery setting. Besides complete conservation of the three canvases, our aim was to study and compare the paintings’ techniques and stylistic qualities, utilizing findings gleaned from diagnostic photography and scientific analysis, in combination with our first-hand observations during the restoration itself.

At the start of our project, the paintings were covered with a thick layer of dirt and candle-smoke deposits. The two ovals had been inserted into their niches by glueing their stretchers to wooden slats affixed to the plaster wall. The hot glue dripped onto the canvas and contracted, forming blisters in the paint layers of Saint Agnes and partially glueing the canvas of Saint Catherine to its stretcher, as well as damaging the painted surface. The wooden frames of all three paintings had been nailed directly onto the front of the canvas. Reading Madonna had over 30 nail holes of varying sizes in the paint layer. Its gilded frame had evidently been removed during a previous restoration, as we found both eighteenth-century nails and more recent nails and screws. The corners of the canvas were badly frayed and their paint was actively flaking, and the same was true in many other areas of the painting.

There were four larger tears in the canvas, three of which had been patched from the reverse. The patches were made of fine pink cloth formerly used in book repair, carefully applied with vegetable glue. These interventions may have been the work of the monastery, which once specialized in book and manuscript conservation. Paint losses were evident around the tears, concealed from the front by fills and clumsy repainting. The most severe paint loss was the Madonna’s hands, most probably damaged when a large bronze crucifix fell off the altar and hit the painting. That damage, and its subsequent repaint, which was itself flaking away, are visible in the only extant photo we found, which dates before 1994.

Catherine, before and after restoration, ph. Ottaviano Caruso

The ovals had numerous nail holes along the edges and some minor holes in the central areas. Fluctuations of temperature and humidity caused the canvases to sag on their stretchers, with the imprinting of the stretcher bars visible on the painted surface. Cracking of the paint was plainly visible in all three works, but so severe in Saint Agnes as to render the image almost unreadable and at risk of flaking.

Before moving the paintings and their frames from their niches, flaking areas were protected with facing paper and cellulose adhesive. After diagnostic photography and paint analysis of micro samples, the cleaning of the thick layers of dirt and smoke deposits was carried out using a mild anionic surfactant. The layers of yellowed natural resin varnish dating from the previous restoration were removed with dilute solvent solutions, whilst we monitored the process under magnification and in UV light. The repaints and fills were removed with solvent gels and through the use of small scalpels. During this process, we discovered original paint underneath the repaints, which aided in reconstructing the Madonna’s hands.

The structural conservation process achieved its goal of re-adhering the layers and minimizing cracking and distortions. The painted surfaces were protected by facing paper, before removing the paintings from their stretchers and cleaning the reverse of the canvases, which included the removal of the patches and glue. Tears and holes were rewoven and reinforced with artificial silk patches adhered with resin film. Next, we mounted the paintings onto larger working stretchers by attaching strips of polyester canvas to the flattened tacking edges. Two types of consolidants, one water-based and one resin-based, were applied to the reverse of the paintings to strengthen the canvas fibres and re-adhere the paint to the canvas. To ensure the penetration of the consolidant resin throughout the layers, the paintings were placed under controlled heat and low pressure with the use of a portable vacuum pump and a conservation mat, a flexible silicon pad with temperature sensors. The process assured the controlled reactivation of the resin, which was then allowed to cool under weight.

To protect the paintings once back inside their niches, an isolating layer of polyester canvas was stretched onto the new expansion stretchers before mounting the paintings. After filling the paint losses, retouching was carried out using gouache colors and pure pigments ground in non-yellowing varnish. The retouching on the Madonna’s hands, using relief mapping of the paint loss and comparing the hands with other paintings by Siriès, remains identifiable as restoration, when viewed from close-up.

Scientific analysis of micro-samples of paint from the three works enabled us to identify pigments and preparation layers consistent with mid-eighteenth-century painters’ practice, with the use of white lead, carbon black, red lead, red lake, and earth colors. Observation under magnification and diagnostic photography of Reading Madonna confirm a painting technique very similar to that of The Madonna Presents the Christ Child to Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, a large altarpiece painted by Siriès in 1767 and restored in 2015-16. During that AWA-sponsored project, we examined numerous paintings by the artist. The brushstrokes, use of colour, canvas preparation and even the adhesion problems in the paint layers of Reading Madonna are consistent with her oeuvre and with the previous work restored. The style and brushwork of the Saint Catherine shows many stylistic and technical similarities with Siriès’ other work.

Saint Agnes, before and after restoration, ph. Ottaviano Caruso

However, Saint Agnes appears to be by a different artist altogether. Both the stretcher and the canvas type are different in the two ovals, which is unusual, if they were prepared or ordered by the same artist. The brushwork is quick and loosely executed, compared to the careful, meticulous rendering of details in the other two paintings. The strokes that create shadows and light on Agnes’ face are much more defined than those used in modelling the faces of Catherine and the Madonna. The extreme cracking of the paint on Saint Agnes also points to probable differences in the painting’s execution.

While not providing definitive answers to the authorship of the ovals, our project has taken us one step further in the exploration of Violante Siriès’ oeuvre. We’re happy to be able to add another piece of the puzzle to our understanding of this intriguing artist, and to preserve her paintings for generations to come.

ELIZABETH WICKS

The ‘Accademia Women: Violante’ project, executed by restorers Elizabeth Wicks and Marina Vincenti, was organized by the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno and Syracuse University in Florence, thanks to the support of the AWA Legacy Fund and donors Connie Clark, Pam Fortune, Nancy Galliher, Nancy Hunt, Margie MacKinnon, Donna Malin and Alice Vogler.

Media Partners: The Florentine, Calliope Arts Foundation, Restoration Conversations