Old Paintings, New Discoveries

On a late August afternoon at BC’s McMullen Museum of Art, professors of art history Stephanie Leone and John Lansdowne ’07 were studying a thirteenth-century painting of the Madonna and child, peering at something new Leone had just noticed. In the lower right corner, someone had crossed out the face of the devil, an ominous brown creature with wings and a tail. By modern standards, such an act would be considered vandalism, but that wouldn’t have been the case at the time when the painting was displayed publicly, Lansdowne said. Defacing an image of the devil would have been celebrated as a “devotional act,” publicly rejecting the evil figure. “It would have actually been thought of as improving upon, in a way, this particular piece,” he said. 

Leone and Lansdowne weren’t aware of the graffiti when they selected the panel painting for their exhibition, Medieval | Renaissance: A Dialogue on Early Italian Painting, which runs through December 7. The nineteen pieces they chose, which include devotional icons, altarpiece panels, narrative scenes, and portraits from the late thirteenth through early sixteenth centuries, are part of the private Frascione Collection in Florence, Italy, and have rarely been displayed publicly. Some have never been studied using modern techniques.

All that is about to change, said Lansdowne. As part of his art history seminar, Painting in Italy at the End of the Middle Ages, he and ten undergraduate and graduate students will have the rare opportunity this fall to conduct original research on three of the paintings. With guidance from Boston-area conservators, they’ll take a closer look at the paintings under specialized lights, and use minimally invasive methods like infrared photography to peek beneath the surface, searching for places where human alterations may have been made to the originals. Lansdowne also hopes to use X-ray fluorescence, known as XRF, to trace the deterioration of physical substances like paint pigments and metals, revealing how outside forces may have changed the paintings through the years. “For a lot of the metals, you can see ways in which pollution has maybe had an effect on these images,” he said. “It tells that longer history.” Lansdowne first studied art history as a student at Boston College, graduating in 2007, and returned to teach in the department in 2024, after pursuing a doctoral degree at Princeton and holding research positions in Europe and the Middle East. His early studies focused on medieval art, but he dislikes being confined to a single time period, and is fascinated by how artworks can be interpreted differently when viewed through various cultural or ideological lenses. “The medievalist interpretive approach is something that had an effect on me and is the basis for my training in the field,” he said, “but where I take it is another thing.”

As cocurators of Medieval | Renaissance, Lansdowne and Leone wanted to showcase how an art historian’s disciplinary background shapes their perspective. Both penned opening statements that hang on opposite sides of the gallery’s entrance: Lansdowne as a medievalist, and Leone as a Renaissance specialist. Many of the paintings they’ve selected are accompanied by separate placards presenting each professor’s impressions, which often focus on entirely different elements. In a portrait depicting the Augustinian friar Gabriele Veneto, for example, Leone describes the artist’s revolutionary use of oil paint to simulate the effect of light and shadow, while Lansdowne highlights a gold inscription naming the subject, which he links to late medieval practices of authentication. Both professors inspected the painting the week before the exhibition opened, going back and forth on when the inscription may have been added (almost certainly after the painting was completed), and the originality of its black and gold frame. “This is the fun part,” Lansdowne said.  

Italian paintings produced during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are often claimed by scholars of both the medieval and Renaissance periods, which is precisely why Leone and Lansdowne chose that era as the focus of their exhibition. This “frontier zone,” as Lansdowne refers to it, was also a time of great artistic innovation, giving rise to techniques like punchwork, where artists used a metal tool to add pattern and texture to gold surfaces, and pastiglia, which created a raised effect. In Lansdowne’s seminar, students from across different majors and academic backgrounds will examine these elements up close and be encouraged to come up with their own unique interpretations. 

More discoveries like Leone’s are likely to be made this semester. “It’s about looking closely and really seeing,” Leone said, surveying the devil’s scratched-out profile. “Half of the answer’s in front of you, and then you have to make sense of it.” ◽