Facelifts & Makeovers

“Facelifts & Makeovers” placed the Mauritshuis conservation studio at the centre of a public exhibition, tracing the restoration and scientific examination of twenty paintings that had passed through the museum’s in-house atelier over the previous quarter century. The show introduced visitors to the working vocabulary of the conservator: varnish removal, pentimenti (changes an artist made during the painting process), dendrochronology (dating wooden panels by their tree rings), consolidation of flaking paint, and the attribution questions that scientific analysis can settle or complicate. Rather than displaying finished pictures in silence, the exhibition revealed the decisions, dilemmas, and sometimes startling discoveries that precede every completed treatment.

All three of the Mauritshuis’s Vermeers figured prominently. The 1994 project known as “Vermeer Illuminated,” carried out publicly in a temporary studio with visitors watching through a glass wall, had cleaned “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and “View of Delft” in preparation for the museum’s landmark 1996 Vermeer exhibition. Removing layers of yellowed and tinted varnish from the “Girl” revealed, among other things, a highlight at the corner of her mouth that had been hidden for at least a century. The treatment of “Diana and Her Companions” in 1999 produced an equally striking finding: pigment analysis showed that the cloudy sky was not Vermeer’s work at all but a later addition, painted with materials that did not exist in the seventeenth century. Conservators chose not to remove it but to conceal it with a thin, reversible layer of paint, restoring the nocturnal mood Vermeer had originally intended and leaving the decision on what to do permanently to future generations.

The exhibition was enriched by a participatory element in which visitors were invited to vote on an unresolved restoration dilemma: a courtyard scene by Pieter de Hooch in which a fourth figure, a soldier holding a tankard, had been painted out at some point after Vermeer’s death, and technical examination had now made him visible again beneath the surface. Whether to restore, to leave, or to find some other course of action was put to the public. The exhibition thus presented conservation not as a closed technical discipline but as an ongoing ethical conversation about authenticity, reversibility, and what future audiences deserve to see.