Simulation and Invention as Techniques for Fixing Paintings in Italy, ca. 1300–1500

Annika Svendsen Finne

The question of how late medieval Italian artist created paintings has been a focus of art historical study for over a century, but such research into process and materials has conventionally been separated from study of how those same works were altered and maintained in their earliest histories. Although artists from the thirteenth through to the sixteenth centuries were regularly required to internalize, preserve, adapt, and complete imagery they did not themselves invent, the possibility that the way a painting was fixed might be in conversation with how it was made has been overlooked. This project explores relationships between reparative and formative activities in premodern Italian painting practice by examining a corpus of approximately seventy “treatments” wherein artists overpainted, expanded, mended, and cut apart pre-existing paintings while still preserving their essential subject matter. Simulation, invention and other techniques often considered to be creative and generative are critically reimagined as methods of accommodation. The exercise of treatment can be newly evaluated as a complex form of recursive art-making on an expanded timescale, where the chronological positions and authorial profiles of an artwork are elastic, tethered primarily to its initial period and maker, but also open to internalizing modifications from later hands.