Back from the brink

2 days ago
7 min read

The restoration of Artemisia’s Hercules and Omphale, the dramatic backstory

By Margie MacKinnon

Originally published in

RESTORATION CONVERSATIONS magazine

Autumn/Winter 2025 - Issue 8

Getty’s senior conservator of paintings Ulrich Birkmaier cleans the surface of Hercules and Omphale,

Artemisia Gentileschi’s Hercules and Omphale, the star of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles’s exhibition, Artemisia’s Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece, was the subject of a three-year restoration by the Getty’s in-house conservation team. Like the artist, whose personal history has been examined in numerous scholarly and popular works, the painting has a dramatic backstory. It came to the attention of the art world following the devastating 2020 blast in the port of Beirut that left thousands of people injured or dead and over 300,000 homeless. The painting is part of the collection of Sursock Palace, originally built in 1860 and still home to the descendants of one of the ‘Seven Families’ in Beirut’s aristocratic nobility. The current stewards of the family home are Roderick Cochrane, son of Sir Desmond Cochrane and Lady Yvonne Sursock, and Roderick’s wife Mary Cochrane.

Perched on a hill above the port, the palace suffered extensive damage in the blast, both structurally and internally – to the priceless artworks and furnishings collected by generations of the Sursock family. The windows on the north elevation facing the sea were all blown out, including one directly opposite the painting, resulting in significant tears that went right through the canvas. “We thought we had removed all the glass before it was wrapped up for shipment to the Getty for restoration,” says Mary Cochrane, but a photo of glass shards, plaster fragments and bits of rubble that were surgically extracted during the restoration process provides a hint to the force of the blast and just how deeply this debris was embedded in the painting.

In the early 1990s, Gregory Buchakjian, a Lebanese art historian studying at the Sorbonne, had been given access to the Sursock collection. With little documentary evidence to go on, he had tentatively attributed Hercules and Omphale to Artemisia, then not widely known outside of art historical circles. Following the blast, Buchakjian revisited the palace and his earlier unpublished study, which he described in a piece for Apollo magazine. The article immediately drew the attention of Artemisia scholars such as Jesse Locker and Sheila Barker, who were inclined to agree with Buchakjian’s visual analysis and conclusions, even before they had seen the painting in person.

Following up on a receipt found in the Sursock archives, Getty curator Davide Gasparotto was able to find an almost continuous provenance for the painting. The work was likely painted in Naples in the mid-1630s. It was first recorded in 1699 as Ercole che fila [Hercules spinning] ‘by the hand of Artemisia Gentileschi’, in the inventory of Carlo de Cardenas, a member of a Neapolitan family known to have given Artemisia commissions. Alfred Sursock (Roderick’s grandfather) purchased the work from an art dealer in Naples around the time of his marriage in 1920 to Neapolitan aristocrat, Maria Teresa Serra di Cassano.

Getty Museum’s senior conservator of paintings Ulrich Birkmaier restores Hercules and Omphale,

The painting recalls the story of the mythological hero Hercules who, having killed his friend Iphitus in a fit of rage, is enslaved by the Lydian Queen Omphale. As penance, he is required to practice humility by performing traditionally female tasks. Hercules is shown spinning thread while Omphale, in the skin of the Nemean lion and holding an olivewood club (attributes associated with Hercules), looks down on him. The theme of gender reversal is reflected in the Getty’s exhibition title. In Artemisia’s works, the women are strong while even the mightiest of men, like Hercules (or Holofernes), are at their mercy.

To learn more about the details of the restoration, Restoration Conversations spoke with conservator Ulrich Birkmaier who led the Getty’s restoration team.

Restoration Conversations: Was Hercules and Omphale the first work by Artemisia Gentileschi that you have worked on?

UB: I worked on an Artemisia painting from a private collection in Hartford, Connecticut when I was at the Wadsworth Atheneum. I love her work, and it is exciting for me to see her getting the respect she deserves. She was a celebrated artist in her own lifetime with commissions from the Medicis, the kings of Spain and England, important patrons in Rome and Sicily … but she was always in the shadow of her father Orazio. For so long, she has been considered one of the greatest female artists of the seventeenth century. No, she is simply one of the greatest artists. Period.

RC: When did you first see the painting and what was your reaction to its condition?

Ulrich Birkmaier: I saw it before it left Beirut. A colleague of mine who is a private conservator in Beirut had applied a facing of Japanese tissue paper to the front of the canvas to secure the paint and avoid any more paint loss. We knew theoretically what the extent of the damage was going to be, and I saw the painting from the back, so I could see all the holes and tears. But it was still a shock. [Back in the conservation studio, Davide Gasparotto and I] began to peel off pieces of the facing paper, exposing Hercules’ knee first. We both gasped because we could see the quality of the paint and already, at that moment, it was clear to us that this was a great painting.

RC: Was there a lot of paint loss on the surface of the canvas?

UB: There was extensive paint loss, though luckily not in the most crucial areas. So, no major losses in limbs or faces or figures but, because of the size of the painting, it was a challenge.

RC: How did you develop the conservation plan for the project?

UB: The privilege that we have at the Getty is that we are able to approach every conservation treatment holistically, with conservation scientists, conservators, art historians and educators all working together. The starting point was the technical study, conducted here at the Getty Conservation Institute, which revealed the extent of the damage, how much old restoration there was and what materials were used. The structural treatment was carried out with the assistance of a guest conservator from Rome, Matteo Rossi Doria. We first secured the paint surface with a new layer of facing tissue and then, with the canvas face down, we removed the old lining canvas which was about 150 years old and had become very brittle. Then every hole, every tear, had to be secured separately, a process that took about three months.

RC: How many previous restorations had been done?

UB: There was definitely one intervention at the time of this old lining which, because of the type of fabric and the age of the glue, can be dated to 100 or 150 years ago. There was also evidence of a more recent conservation campaign at Sursock Palace. They didn’t have a record of it, but it was done with water-based paints, probably in the mid-1900s. We had to remove these older restorations which had been generously applied and were covering much of the original paint.

RC: When Gregory Buchakjian first studied the painting, he thought that the bare foot of the figure on the lower left side was “very badly painted” and couldn’t possibly be by Artemisia. Did you agree with him on that?

UB: When we took the facing off the painting and saw the foot, both Davide and I were like, ‘Oh, that is terrible.’ But it turns out that the entire bottom five inches or so of the painting had been damaged. It was nothing to do with the explosion but was much older. It looked as though there had been contact with water at some point. The foot had been reconstructed in an earlier restoration campaign, with a lot of bad overpainting covering the original, yet very abraded, foot. Quite a few fragments by Artemisia were still there which guided me in the restoration. I actually had help from a good friend of mine, Federico Castelluccio, a great painter and collector of Baroque paintings, although he is better known as an actor. He played Furio, the hitman from Naples, in The Sopranos.

RC: That seems fitting – and another great story for this painting with its long, tangled history. What else did the x-rays reveal?

UB: The X-rays of most of Artemisia’s paintings show dramatic changes, which is very telling to us. It means that she didn’t adhere tightly to an underdrawing but made changes during the painting process, which is what she did in this work. For example, she painted a completely different head of Hercules. Originally, she had him looking outward, in a three-quarter profile. But then she must have changed her mind and painted on top of that the current head, which has Hercules in almost compete profile, looking up at Omphale.

RC: When you did your analysis of all the pigments and the mediums that Artemisia used, was there anything that came as a surprise?

UB: What was interesting to us was the relative economy of the pigments that she employed. She used a very reduced palette which was in keeping with Roman and Neapolitan painting at the time. So, no big surprises, except for one pigment: lapis. She used ultramarine blue for the large drapery of the figure in the foreground with the tambourine. That was a surprise because, of course, lapis was very expensive, so it must have been an important commission. But she was very smart in how she applied the pigment because she used a very thick ground, and then for the lighter blue areas, she underpainted it with a layer of lead white first and then just the tiniest, thinnest layer of lapis. And the same for the dark blue. She used a dark ground with a very thin layer of lapis on top of that, which would be almost like enamel.

RC: Artemisia is known to have collaborated with other artists in Naples on some of her large paintings. Is there any evidence to suggest Hercules and Omphale is the work of more than one painter?

UB: We do know that she collaborated very frequently, especially on the ambitious large compositions that she embarked on during the Naples years. But it looks as if this one is all her. And the Artemisia scholars who came to see the painting while I was working on it seemed to share the view that it is completely in her own hand.

MARGIE MACKINNON