Word: varnished
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Cranach Was Hidden. Going from "castle to castle" between world wars, she restored some 500 works for fellow bluebloods. She learned how to smooth over chipped spots ("like filling a tooth"), repaint damaged hands and noses, replace frayed lining, spruce up dull paint with a coat of bright varnish. As she became more skilled, she repaired masterpieces by Rubens, Tiepolo and Velasquez. Once, working on a dark, somber painting by the 16th century Italian Jacopo Palma, she found a whole covey of saints and angels hiding under the grime. Another time, she was called in to restore an unusual Lucas...
Today he "paints" with thick pastes, viscous mixtures of zinc oxide and heavy varnish. Sometimes he adds sand to make a kind of mortar, applies it with large, dull putty knives. The soft colors he uses -rose, brown, dull reds and yellow-spread erratically as his "empasto" heaves into unexpected shapes and dries...
...experts began with a painstaking study of the painting's twelve panels with microscope and X-ray photographs. Then they impregnated the surface with beeswax, and flattened out blisters with warmed spatulas. With mild solvents, they removed centuries of varnish (sometimes twelve layers deep) and retouchings, and they scrupulously avoided doing any retouching of their...
...Carter does not rely solely on the desert varnish to prove his case. Along the coast of Southern California are many kitchen middens, where ancient Californians tossed refuse from their shore dinners. Middens containing the handiwork of recent Indians are full of well-preserved shells. In middens containing fine stone blades (probably from the Folsom period), the lime of the shells is partly leached away. Middens that have lost all their lime have stone artifacts much cruder than the Folsom type. There are even older middens with only rough stone flakes and grinding slabs. These sometimes have two or three...
...Desert Varnish. Anthropologist Carter uses an odd geological time-recorder to support his theory that the Folsom or Sandia hunters invaded a long-inhabited hemisphere. On the deserts of Southern California, many firmly rooted stones are covered with dark brown "desert varnish." No one is sure how this is formed or how long it takes to form, but Folsom-type spearheads found on the desert never show more than a trace of it. The crude weapons of simpler folk are often varnished thickly, and the cruder they are, the darker is the varnish. This is pretty good proof, Carter thinks...