Bringing a Goddess Back to Life

Hsiao-Hsuan Chao saw Diana and Her Nymphs on the Hunt for the first time just before her internship in the Getty paintings conservation department began in 2019.

Her supervisor, Getty conservator Laura Rivers, met her at the reception desk and walked her down the hallway to the painting conservation studio. Diana stood on the easel just behind her desk.

“The painting was larger than I thought, and the largest I’ve worked on among my past conservation projects,” Chao remembered. “I was excited for the conservation treatment to bring the distinct brushstrokes and saturated color from Rubens’s workshop back to life.”

Diana, executed by Peter Paul Rubens’s assistants according to his design, was one of J. Paul Getty’s favorite paintings—he mentioned it in diaries and in comments to the media, and chose to be photographed in front of it. He purchased the work in 1961 and hung it in his grand, stately home, Sutton Place, in England. In 1971, Getty donated the painting to the Getty Museum. But the painting was never displayed in the Museum galleries. When preparations began for the Villa exhibition Rubens: Picturing Antiquity, Diana came out of storage and into the conservation studio.

Although the painting was in stable condition, the layers of varnish, which are meant to protect the surface of the painting and saturate the colors, had degraded over time. This gave the painting a yellowish appearance and obscured its lively colors. The varnish was also so thick that it was difficult to see the texture of the brushstrokes.

Chao focused her year-long internship on studying Diana and removing the varnish layers as well as old retouchings that were applied before Getty acquired the painting. These areas had discolored and no longer matched the original paint. She also inpainted areas where paint loss had occurred. The result is a more radiant composition that conveys Rubens’s original intentions: Diana, goddess of animals and the hunt, appears to leap off the canvas, and the tranquil landscape recedes into the distance.

Removing the Varnish

Chao began by gently brushing and vacuuming away dust and debris. She then cleaned the paint surface using distilled water on handmade cotton swabs.

Next, she tested a few different solutions on different paint colors to determine the best one for safely removing the degraded varnish without damaging the original paint underneath. She applied the chosen formula with handmade cotton swabs.

Finally, she applied a gel to the areas that contained discolored retouching. This enabled the retouching to be removed along with the gel, and she used a final clearance solution on cotton swabs to ensure that no material residues remained on the surface.

Revarnishing and Inpainting

With the degraded varnish and old, discolored retouching successfully reduced, it was time to revarnish the painting and address damaged areas. Using a brush, Chao applied a layer of synthetic varnish to the surface of the painting; then, she used a spatula to apply a fill material consisting of a chalk-based putty into areas of paint loss. “Where paint losses occur and result in areas that are not level with the surrounding original paint, conservators need to fill in the losses,” Chao said. She applied another layer of synthetic varnish over the filled-in areas.

To repair damaged areas in the sky and figures (like Diana’s knee), Chao retouched the losses—a process called inpainting. As with the varnish and fill material, the modern materials used for this step are easily reversible and can be removed in the future, if desired. Chao’s internship ended prior to completion of the inpainting. Senior conservator Ulrich Birkmaier carried out further inpainting and used a spray gun to apply a final layer of synthetic varnish over the entire painting.

Getty’s frame conservator adjusted the gilded frame to cover a non-original five-centimeter-wide strip along the right edge of the painting that was added sometime in the past. He also collaborated with the decorative arts and sculpture conservation department to use 3D-printing to replace broken and missing ornamentation. Diana was now ready to be hung in the Villa gallery.

Diana and Her Nymphs on the Hunt is now on view in Rubens: Picturing Antiquity, and the painting that greets visitors today at the entrance to the exhibition looks far more vivid than when it emerged from storage. Meanwhile, Chao returned home to Taiwan, where she opened her own conservation studio, but remains struck by the painting’s dramatic transformation.

“The conservation work really recovered the vivid tonality in the sky and Diana and the nymphs’ drapery, and the nuance in the well-crafted flesh tones,” Chao said. “These bring Diana and the other figures out from the background and give an impression of depth.”

See Diana and Her Nymphs on the Hunt in Rubens: Picturing Antiquity at the Getty Villa through January 24, 2022.