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#and I really wanna see Isabella de’Medici’s portrait before I die
mrhyde-mrseek · 4 months
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Currently thinking about how the portrait of Isabella de’Medici was transferred from wood panel to canvas and then altered to fit Victorian beauty standards by a man named Francis Needham so that a buyer would be more attracted to it, and hundreds of years later we only know what Isabella really looks like due to Ellen Baxter, the conservator of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, discovering that the cracks in the painting were smaller than cracks in old canvas usually are, thus leading to the discovery of the Victorian version of photoshop done to her-
(Victorian canvas transfer on the left, original wood panel on the right)
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