Restoration of Rembrandt's "Night Watch" Begins, 'Like A Military Operation'
'Like a military operation': restoration of Rembrandt's Night Watch begins. Elaborate process will be livestreamed from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. The Guardian, July 5, 2019.
The restorers, data experts and art historians at the Rijksmuseum call it Operation Night Watch. “Because it is like a military operation in the planning,” said Taco Dibbits, the museum’s general director.
At 9am on Monday, as the doors of the Amsterdam museum open to the public, the largest and most elaborate public art restoration in history will begin. In a specially constructed seven sq metre glass chamber, a team of 12 experts will work to bring back to its former glory one of the world’s most spectacular paintings: The Night Watch by Rembrandt. The process will not only be performed in front of the public, in the building built in 1885 as a “cathedral of the arts”, where The Night Watch occupies the “high altar” in the museum’s gallery of honour, but will be livestreamed to millions around the world.
...The Night Watch has been moved only a handful of times in the last 150 years, including its transportation into a bunker in the coastal dunes at the start of the second world war, and later in the conflict into mines in the south of the Netherlands.
“Any move of any painting, especially The Night Watch, which is such a large painting, you always have to be very careful and it is very precisely done,” said Dibbits. “It is moved from the wall by hand and then hydraulic lifts on to a kind of cart especially constructed for it on wheels, and then it is pushed into the glass case which has one very high door which enables it to move it there without barely any vibrations.”
On Monday morning, Dibbits will offer the gathering crowds and online viewers an introduction to the team working on the masterpiece. “And then we will let them get to work,” he said...
MORE, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jul/05/restoration-rembrandt-night-watch-begins-rijksmuseum-amsterdam
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September 20, 20129:08 AM ET
MARK MEMMOTT
Three images: How the fresco should look (left); how it looked before the "restoration" (center); and what it looked like after Cecilia Gimenez was done.
Centre de Estudios Borjanos/AFP/Getty Images
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