Hidden Goddess

As the official restorer for Kansas City's William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, James Roth was the first to notice something strange about one of the old Chinese murals on loan to the gallery. All were well-preserved examples of 12th century Chinese wall painting, brilliant scenes of ancient deities in jewels and flowing robes; in one, Roth saw a curious crack running across the surface, and down inside the fissure he spotted a trace of bright blue paint peeping through. Then the murals went back to their owner and Roth forgot about it.

Last year the owner decided to give the Nelson gallery the cracked mural. When Roth saw the mysterious trace of blue again, he got permission to try a delicate experiment. He cut a tiny square out of the 800-year-old painting, looked underneath and jumped up with excitement: this time the second layer showed brilliant red. For six months. Roth carefully cut and loosened square after square of the top layer, lifted them out with kitchen spatulas, then carefully scraped and vacuumed off a thin layer of rice husks and mud to expose a second mural underneath the first.

Last week, for the first time, the Nelson gallery proudly showed off the results of Restorer Roth's patient work. By removing the 12th century mural (which he carefully reassembled on a new panel), Roth had uncovered a magnificent loth century Tang painting of Kuan-yin, the Goddess of Mercy, done in brilliant vermilion, orange, green and blue. Some 800 years ago, temple priests in North China had evidently tired of the goddess on their wall, ordered her plastered over with a layer of mud and rice husks, then commissioned artists to paint another scene on top. Experts could give no estimate of its value beyond saying that it was a priceless example of 10th century Chinese wall painting and one of the few available for study by Western scholars. Said Professor Yukio Yashiro, after a look at Missouri's 1,000-year-old goddess: "This is one of the greatest discoveries of our time in the field of oriental painting."

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