Judas painting survived Reformation by being turned around
November 24, 2015 | In the PressFrom The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/24/judas-iscariot-painting-reformation-fitzwilliam-museum)
A rare medieval panel showing Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Christ survived the Reformation due to a remarkable instance of 16th-century recycling, researchers in Cambridge have discovered.
The brightly painted wooden panel of The Kiss of Judas escaped the systematic destruction of thousands of church paintings because someone turned it around and used the back for another purpose – most likely to display the Ten Commandments.
This recycling, discovered by the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Hamilton Kerr Institute, is also likely to have saved the panel from Puritan iconoclasts in the English civil war, who destroyed a lot of art that had survived the earlier purge.
“The single most fascinating thing about the painting is how it survived,” said Lucy Wrapson, the conservator who made the discovery. “This was basically repurposed and that’s how it made it through. I can’t stress how rare this is. I can think of one other image of Judas that survives from an English church of the period.”
Estimates say up to 97% of English religious art was destroyed during and after the Reformation.
The panel was bought by the Fitzwilliam in 2012 from the Church of St Mary in Grafton Regis, Northamptonshire, which did not have the money to conserve it. The funds went towards fixing the church roof.
The panel arrived in Wrapson’s lab in a sorry state, she said, covered in discoloured varnish, bat faeces, dust and cobwebs. “It was really dark and discoloured, you could see roughly what was on the surface but you couldn’t see the back, it had been covered by a horrible plywood board. The front was really dark and murky, you could not make out the vibrant colours.”
Wrapson removed the plywood on its reverse and discovered faint traces of writing. Infra-red photography revealed that the painting must have been turned around in the 16th century, whitewashed and used as a board almost certainly listing the Ten Commandments. “It is quite likely that it was turned round by someone who did not want it destroyed,” said Wrapson.
The painting shows Judas betraying Christ with a kiss accompanied by snarling soldiers and St Peter. In the background, birds sweep dramatically through the glowering sky.
The panel, which would have been part of a Passion of Christ cycle, was even more unusual, Wrapson said, because it was unscratched by devout Catholics who were known to attack images of Judas.
The painting has been dated by the dendrochronologist Ian Tyers, who said it was made from boards imported from the eastern Baltic, from a tree felled after 1423. It became a painting in around 1460. The only other known surviving Judas panel is in St Michael’s church in Mitcheldean, Gloucestershire.
The Fitzwilliam is announcing the conservation results on Wednesday; the painting itself has gone on display in its Rothschild gallery of medieval works. A replica will also be displayed at the Church of St Mary in due course, the museum said.
The panel is a fascinating story of survival but Wrapson said it should also be enjoyed as a work of art. “It is very beautiful and the colours are really vibrant, probably because it has been turned round for a few hundred years of its life and it hasn’t had chance to fade. It shows how bright something medieval would have looked.”
