Restorers at Antwerp’s Royal Fine Arts Museum are carefully restoring Peter Paul Rubens' massive 'Enthroned Madonna Adored by Saints' masterpiece in full view of the public.
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00:00So this work was covered by a very exceptionally, I must say,
00:29thick and yellow varnish, which distorted, on the one hand, the colors,
00:34but on the other hand, also the brushwork, which had become impossible to see.
00:39But once you remove the varnish, the paint also has a bit of a matte appearance.
00:47And it has happened on several occasions that a visitor stopped by
00:52and thought that we were ruining the painting.
00:55The visitors don't know that we are going to apply a new varnish,
01:02and that that new varnish will create more saturation, more depth in colors,
01:08and that the result of that will be much nicer than the discolored varnish
01:14that is just a brown film on top of the original paint layer.
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