The Oldest Madonna

WHAT may be the West's oldest painting of the Madonna has been rediscovered in Rome's Church of Santa Francesca Romana. An expert restorer named Pico Cellini found the panel (right) under a 13th century Tuscan canvas of the same subject, which he had been commissioned to clean.

Until the last few decades, "restorers" hid more pictures, under new and falsely prettifying layers of paint and varnish, than they cleaned. Modern practitioners take the bolder course of removing past additions in order to restore pictures to something approximating their original state. Sometimes they scrub with too much enthusiasm, destroying the translucent glazes of a picture surface and reducing it to the artist's bare beginnings. More often, as in the case of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper (TIME, Oct. 4), they succeed in bringing back much of the painting's original bloom and freshness. Their greatest, and rarest, delight lies in discovering new and better pictures beneath the old, as Cellini did in Rome.

Cellini's first hint that he had found something important was the presence of a few spots of wax where the 13th century canvas had deteriorated. To him the spots spelled encaustic, a method of painting with pigments mixed in hot wax, which was common among the ancients. Cellini dissolved the glue between the canvas and the panel on which it was mounted. Slowly, with utmost caution, he peeled back the canvas, preserving it in the process. On the panel underneath was an encaustic painting which churchmen of the Middle Ages had apparently thought too old-fashioned to keep. The ancient Madonna gazes with Byzantine intensity from eyes wide and dark as night. She has the classic profile and small, thoughtful mouth of late Roman art. Experts agree that the picture must have been painted only four or five centuries after Christ's birth.

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