This painting survived the Beirut explosion. Here's how conservators restored it
After a long-forgotten painting of Hercules and Omphale was punctured by glass and coated in debris during the 2020 explosion in Beirut, the monumental oil-on-canvas, painstakingly restored over more than three years, has gone on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
In the wake of the tragedy, the painting, dated to the 1630s, was finally properly attributed to the great Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th-century Italian Baroque painter who has become one of the few female artists of her era to be recognized today. Having passed only between three private collections over four centuries, the 'Artemisia's Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece' exhibition marks the first time the painting has ever been on public display.
The canvas depicts the Greek mythological hero Hercules, who was enslaved by the Queen of Lydia, Omphale, and made to do tasks traditionally associated with women, such as weaving — in Gentileschi's composition he raises a spindle of wool — before they fall in love. Gentileschi often gave her mythological and Biblical female figures a striking sense of agency, such as her most widely known scene of the widow Judith violently beheading Assyrian general Holofernes. In the newly attributed painting, she toys with subverted gender roles as her lovelorn protagonists close the gap between them, their pearlescent skin adorned in sumptuous draped fabrics.
For decades, 'Hercules and Omphale' hung in the Sursock Palace, a private and opulent mid-19th century townhouse owned by Beirut's Sursock family for five generations. The explosion in the Lebanese capital, which killed more than 200 people and injured thousands, caused devastation to the building and its owners, with the matriarch of the family, 98-year-old Yvonne Sursock Cochrane, eventually succumbing to her injuries.
A receipt from the family showed that the painting entered the Sursock collection from an art dealer in Naples, where Gentileschi lived the later years of her life. At the time of the explosion, the artist's then-unknown masterpiece was hanging in front of a window, according to the Getty, which exploded through the canvas. The broken glass riddled it with holes and a wide, L-shaped tear through Hercules' knee.
'It was really severe. It's probably the worst damage I've ever seen,' said Ulrich Birkmaier, the Getty Museum's senior conservator of painting, in a phone call with CNN.
Beyond the sudden violence to the painting and its frame, the artwork had already suffered flaking paint, cracks and cupping from humid conditions, Birkmaier said He added that Gentileschi's vision had been further marred by discolored varnish and overpainting from a previous restoration attempt centuries earlier. When Birkmaier saw it for the first time in Beirut, one year after the explosion, he gathered debris that had collected behind its surface in case the miniscule paint fragments clinging to the glass could be puzzled back together in Los Angeles.
Though mended, cleaned, and carefully restored with analysis from X-rays and XRF mapping, the painting has been rehabilitated into its luminous and poetic intent, though, in Birkamaier's view, it will never look quite as it did.
'You'll always see some scars of the damage,' he said.
If not for the explosion, 'Hercules and Omphale' may have continued to be an unidentified work, only considered a Gentileschi painting by a Lebanese art historian who had seen it decades earlier.
In the early 1990s, Gregory Buchakjian was a graduate student at Sorbonne University in Paris and writing his thesis the Sursock collection. It was then that he made the connection between 'Hercules and Omphale' and another painting, 'Penitent Magdalene,' to Gentileschi, but he didn't pursue publishing his research more widely, according to the arts publication Hyperallergic. In an article for Apollo magazine in September 2020, Buchakjian attributed both paintings to the Italian artist, leading to wider acknowledgement of his research and consensus over her authorship.
Over the course of her career, Gentileschi, the daughter of the Mannerist painter Orazio Gentileschi, was commissioned by top artistic patrons — the Medici family in Italy as well as monarchs Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England — before being lost to history following her death in 1653. Some 60 paintings or more exist today, though a few have been contested as copies or collaborations.
'She was very, very famous during her day, but all but forgotten in the centuries after, which is true for many Baroque painters, but for women, of course, particularly,' Birkmaier said.
Rediscovered in the 20th century and amplified by the 1970s feminist movement, Gentileschi's resurgence helped pave the way for researching and foregrounding female artists of the past.
Still, there are too few technical studies of her work, according to Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of paintings at the Getty Museum, compared to her male counterparts. The Getty's report provides insight into her techniques and materials and how she revised the composition over time, such as altering the position of Hercules' head and gaze to strengthen the emotional charge, which is 'very much Artemisia,' Gasparotto said.
'We are gradually building better knowledge of her way of painting, but I think we need more, especially because she's a painter that changes quite a lot in terms of stylistic development over the course of her career,' he explained. 'She's an artist who looks a lot at what is going on around her, and she absorbs (it).'
Gentileschi trained with her father, but was also influenced by her Baroque peers and predecessors, such as Caravaggio and Guercino. She traveled widely in Europe, trained in Venetian techniques and adopted other skills from Naples, where she took up residency later in life and set up a workshop. Her time in Naples in the 1630s has been considered 'less interesting' by scholars, Gasparotto said, but he disagrees — and can now cite 'Hercules and Omphale' as further proof.
'Her paintings grow in size. They are monumental paintings, ambitious compositions, multi-figure compositions,' Gasparotto said. He believes Hercules in this work is her most accomplished male figure — 'especially for a painter who couldn't study male nudes after a living model, because being a woman, she wasn't allowed to do that.'
When the glass tore through Gentileschi's painting, it missed many of the painting's focal points, though part of Hercules' nose and eye suffered damage. That was the trickiest area to reconstruct, Birkmaier said, but he was able to see Gentileschi's earlier draft of Hercules' head in the X-ray to aid in reconstruction. He called in help from a friend: Federico Castelluccio, the Italian American actor best known for his role as Furio in 'The Sopranos,' who is also a painter and collector of Baroque art (and who once discovered a $10 million Guercino painting). (The TV series aired on HBO, which shares Warner Bros. Discovery as a parent company with CNN.)
'He assisted me with another conservation treatment years ago. And so he painted the head of Hercules for me and suggested what the eye that was missing there should look like,' Birkmaier recalled. 'And so I based my reconstruction on that, and it was very helpful.'
Restoring an old work doesn't mean making it like new, but maintaining the 'decay from time' that occurs with a 400-year-old painting, Birkmaier said. As he and other specialists gradually worked on the painting, it began to reveal itself.
'You have this painting in pieces, and all you see is the damage and the discolored varnish and the old restoration and the big holes, and then little by little, as you work on it… the image emerges again,' he recalled. 'It's a really interesting process of discovery. I wanted to do her justice.'
Some of the identifying features of Gentileschi's work seen in 'Hercules and Omphale' include her renderings of fabrics and jewelry and the subtle gestures she repeats across canvases.
'It's very poetic the way she turns, she turns (Omphale's) head, this upright gaze,' Birkmaier said, explaining that many of her female figures mimic that tilt. 'In the other paintings that we have on loan from her, it's the same exact (position).'
It can be seen, too, in 'Susanna and the Elders,' from 1638-40, another recent discovery of Gentileschi's that is in the UK's Royal Collection Trust, painted during her time at the court of Charles I with her father. In 2023, it was identified after a century in storage, deteriorating and misattributed to the 'French School,' according to Artnet. Another rediscovered Gentileschi work, a portrait of David with the head of Goliath, will headline a Sotheby's auction in July.
'There's definitely a lot of room for discovery,' Gasparotto said, though he cautioned that attribution is not always clear-cut considering her workshop is still not fully understood, and she tended to work in conjunction with landscape artists later in life.
'I don't know how many will emerge from museum storages,' he said. 'But within the market, within private collections, there might be other paintings by her that will emerge in the upcoming years.'
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