Workers at Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Boston Museum of Fine Art, MFA) recently made a surprising discovery. To prepare for the upcoming event was held X-ray diffraction analysis of paintings of Italian Renaissance painter Jacopo Tintoretto «Christmas», in which it was found that this product represents something of a «pazzla», compiled from several fragments of a very different work. Cloth, which is located horizontally, and depicts a scene of Christmas, was originally vertical and depicted a scene ... Crucifixion! Apparently, the artist decided to change the subject, cut and moved pieces of canvas that he has not liked. Then (presumably through two decades), he continued to work, caused a new pictorial layer and creates a new composition.

«Not so very rarely happens that with the help of X-ray, we find below the top layer of the colorful picture of an entirely different subject. However, to tear your own picture - in European art is all the same rare phenomenon », - told the Frederick Ilchmen (Frederick Ilchman), assistant curator, who is preparing the exhibition in the MFA, devoted Titsianu, Tintoretto and Veronese. According to him, this work, a composition which earlier had seemed somewhat clumsy, and now appears in a new light.

Even the untutored viewer might notice that in this picture, of a width of about 4 meters, something is wrong. St. Anna, which hands, as if in a fit of despair, looking at the lamb, rather than the infant. View a shepherd with a beard, whose presence at the scene of Christmas in general is quite strange looking somewhere skyward. The figure of Mary sitting too large, and if present, that she stood up to full height, it seems that she just vyvalitsya beyond the canvas. A figure of Joseph, by contrast, is too flat and as if compressed.

museum were literally shocked when using the scanning x-ray to see that the picture is made of five parts, and some fragments, including the shepherds and the Magi, were written later and the other hand - perhaps the assistants of the artist's studio. Under the top layer of paint over the head of Virgin Mary, they saw two feet and something resembling a vertical wooden board. Then it became clear that cross-linked fragments were originally written for «Crucifixion». With the help of computer specialists joined them and were almost complete symmetrical composition. It remains unclear just one thing: where is the missing part of the picture with the image of Jesus on the cross? Frederick Ilchmen suggests that husbandly Tintoretto not spent wasted no piece of canvas, and is now part of the «Crucifixion», most likely, is another picture of one of the Venetian churches.

As to the reasons why an artist so radically «transform» his work, the theories on this subject from many Ilchmena. Perhaps, the customer refused the order Tintoretto, or did not pay for it. Perhaps the finished cloth was damaged. And perhaps the author of the picture just did not like, and he decided to remake it, to earn this money.

With surprising results of this study will be available at the exhibition «Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: rivals in the Venice of the Renaissance», which will open at Boston Museum of Fine Arts March 15, 2009.

material produced Catherine Onuchin

Sources: boston.com , artinvestment.ru