Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 105. (Budapest, 2006)

ANDRÁS FÁY - MIKLÓS GÁLOS: The Restoration of Maarten van Heemskerck's Budapest Lamentation Panel

the overpainting. The terminus ante quern refers to the arrival of the painting in the museum's collection in 1916 already in its overpainted state. We do not know how much the patches of retouching were visible at that time. The description of the inventory says: "Background: clear blue sky, divided in the middle by the dark brown trunk of the cross."

16 Unfortunately, no contemporaneous photographic record of the painting has survived.

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" In any case, those patches of retouching which in recent decades w

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ere also visible to the naked eye are not present on the photos that illustrate the publications about the discovery of the work.

18 On the basis of the discolouring of the retouching, the overpainting must date from the second half of the nineteenth century. Since the overpainted figures appeared in a perfect state during the cleaning, the reason for the intervention could not have beeen to cover up the damage to the background. It can only be of a stylistic nature: the overpainting was applied in an attempt to adjust Heemskerck's composition, crowded in a mannerist way, to the Renaissance ideal of the classical pyramidal composition.

19 CONCLUSIONS In the pre-restoration state of the painting it was quite conspicuous that some figures, such as Nicodemus and the holy women, present in the traditional iconography of the scene, were missing. This was even more unusual since Heemskerck in his works on similar subject matter representing the Lamentation or the Entombment always included more figures.

20 According to Zsuzsa Urbach's supposition, the panel was severely mutilated on both sides and the missing figures would have been shown on the parts that were cut out.

21 As an analogy to the Budapest painting, she made a reference to the horizontal Lamentation of Christ, whose location is presently unknown and which made its last recorded appearance on the New York art market.

22 The results of the restoration do not endorse this supposition. The cropping of the panel can only represent a few centimetres of loss at most. The composition is closed at the bottom, although the foot of Mary Magdalen's jar of ointment was obviously a bit farther from the original edge of the panel. The inscription placed on the trunk of the cross rules out the possibility that the part cut out was of any significant size. The arched right arm of Mary Magdalen and, corresponding to it, Christ's hanging left arm expressly round off the composition at both sides, and Joseph of Arimathaea's arm supporting Christ is just within the picture field. Some new ones have been added to these hitherto knowm compositional characteristics, which reinforce the sense of completeness of the composition. The slightly inclined head of the holy woman turning towards the centre of the composition from the left and Nicodemus' face like-