Study and Treatment of a ‘Calvary’ from Biennes-Lez-Happart

Abstract

This Calvary, dating from the second half of the sixteenth century, is typical of works from Hainaut, a province in the west of Belgium. The three sculptures Christ on the cross, the Virgin and 5t John are carved in oakwood and polychromed. Each one is about 1.30m high. They were suspended outside a building, protected by a small roof. The exposure to weathering of this group was the cause of the numerous degradations observed· on both the wood and the paint layers. The Calvary is intended for display in the museum of the town of Thuin. Its appearance when it came into the workshop of the Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique was soawful that we could not limit ourselves to simple conservation. The treatment we chose has the aim of restoring the aesthetic coherence of the sculptures while respecting their history. Given their condition, this inevitably involves the removal of overpaints. A simultaneous stratigraphic study of the three statues of the Calvary allowed us to choose an interesting level of polychromy that was also aesthetically fitting for all three sculptures. After conservation treatment (fixing, consolidation, cleaning of bare wood), several overpaints will be removed to the stratigraphic level determined by the study. The remaining polychromy will be retouched and the bare wood lightly tinted if necessary, then protected with Cosmolloid wax. The condition of the wood is very uneven. The parts left bare where the paint layers had fallen off had suffered water damage and erosion. These areas present many median cracks where the wood has lost its mechanical properties and its sculptural form. Where it is still covered by paint, the wood is sound. The paint layers are very damaged: cupping, overpaints worn down to different levels, a network of large rectangular cracks, separation of the various paint layers, covering of the underlying lacunae by the last two overpaints without preliminary levelling, lacunae down to the wood. These last are very notable on the front of the sculptures: 80% for Christ, 75% for the Virgin, 50% for 5t John. The thickness of the combined overpaints (up to 2mm) significantly coarsens the sculptural forms. The examinations performed in parallel on the three sculptures revealed 17 overpaints over an original polychromy that has almost totally disappeared. This great number ofoverpaints is explained by the frequency of maintenance necessary for pieces exposed out of doors. The fragmentary state of the ~riginal polychromy and its