Mind of Obsidian

Thanks to a pair of a bionic gloves, this 80-year-old classical pianist can finally play the piano again. The maestro, João Carlos Martins, had lost dexterity in his hands due to aging and health complications. His face at being able to play piano again says it all. 🎶

By the time he was 20 years old, João Carlos had already been invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to play at the Carnegie Hall, played with the biggest north american orchestras, and recorded the entire work of Bach for the piano. At the height of his skills, he could play 21 notes per second.

In 1965, at 24 years old, he suffered an accident during a soccer match which ended up causing an injury on his right elbow, damaging his ulnar nerve and atrophying 3 of his fingers. This caused him to stop playing for a year, and to play with difficulty until his 30s.

After long periods of physical therapy, but still with much difficulty, he returned to the stages and was received several positive reviews and was acclaimed by the public. However, he ended up developing a work-related musculoskeletal disorder, which forced him to stop playing again.

This wasn’t enough to make him give up on his musical career, and even with atrophied fingers and paralyzed hands, he still managed to play and record all basically of Bach’s work from 1979 to 1985, still being wildly popular despite his difficulties.

However, the worst would come in 1995: at 55 years old, during a robbery in Bulgaria, João Carlos was struck in the head with an iron bar, resulting in neurological sequelae which paralyzed his right arm. After a lot of physical and neurological therapy, he managed to move his right hand again enough to play the piano with both hands, but due to a worsening of his condition, at 58, he started to develop troubles not only moving his hand, but also speaking, so he had to go through another surgery. It didn’t seem like he would recover much movement in his hand after surgery, however, so he used the short time he had before his hand atrophied completely to record one last CD with both hands.

In 2001, at 61, he recorded the album Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, written by Maurice Ravel for Paul Wittgenstein, an austrian pianist who lost his right arm during World War 1.

His intention was to record 8 albums using only his left hand, however, his left hand developed a disease called Dupuytren’s contracture, causing his fingers to become permanently bent and contracted, as well as causing pain. He went through another surgery, this time in his left hand, but it didn’t prevent him from losing movement in his left hand, causing him to have to abandon the piano, seemingly for good.

This still didn’t keep him away from music, and after learning to conduct from a friend of his, he became a conductor in 2003, at 63 years old. Due to his paralyzed fingers, João Carlos couldn’t actually hold the baton or even turn the pages in the score (at least not fast enough to not stall the music), however, so instead the maestro simpy memorized every score note by note. He memorized, on average, 5000 score pages. (Unfortunately, he started to develop dystonia on his left arm, causing it to twitch, which caused him to have to stop conducting for a while, but he came back shortly after and has been conducting ever since.)

He went through another brain surgery in 2012, to recover the movements in his left hand, but at this point it was so atrophied he hadn’t even opened it in 10 years. He still occasionally played the piano in important events, and he even played at the opening of the 2016 Summer Paralympics in Rio, but his playing was very slow and he could barely use his fingers, playing only a single note per second (compare with his 21 notes per seconds back when he was young).

(João Carlos Martins playing at an event in São Bernardo do Campo, 2013)

You: If I make my standards known, I'll be ostracized!

Normally, acetone is too volatile for restoration, but when it’s a gel, it becomes very stable and a) stays on top of the porous surface of the painting, and b) won’t evaporate. So it can eat up the varnish.

The Mona Lisa is a glazed painting.

A Direct Painting is one in which the artist mixes a large amount of paint of the correct value and shade the first time, and applies it to the painting. A Glazed Painting is a painting in which an underpainting is painted, generally in shades of gray or brown, and a allowed to dry, before layers of very thin glaze - a mixture of a tiny bit of pigment and a lot of oil - is applied to the surface.  Some artists, such as Leonardo, choose to work this way because it provides an incredible sense of light and illumination (look at how the real Mona Lisa seems to glow).

The Mona Lisa is an incredible work of glazed painting, but that makes it fragile, so fragile that many conservators don’t want to work on it because it’s extremely difficult and a conservation effort go wrong for many many reasons. One of the reasons it could go wrong is that the glazes and the varnish layers are actually a very similar chemical composition, and a conservator could accidentally strip off layers of glaze while removing the varnish. 

In fact, in 1809 during its first restoration when they stripped off the varnish, they also stripped off some of the top paint layers, which has caused the painting to look more washed out than Leonardo painted it. 

The Mona Lisa also has a frankly ridiculous amount of glaze layers on it, as Leonardo considered it incomplete up until he died, He actually took it with him when he left Italy (fleeing charges of homosexuality), meaning it never even got to the family who had commissioned it, and instead constantly altered it, trying to get it just a touch more perfect every time. That makes it really fragile, with countless layers of very thin paint, many of which have cracked, warped, flaked, or discolored. It’s not just the top layer, its layers and layers of glazing throughout the painting that have slowly discolored or been damaged over time.

Speaking of damage, look at the cracking. That’s called craquelure; it happens with many painting’s (even ones that aren’t painted with this technique) because the paint shrinks as it dries, or the surface it’s painted on warps.  Notice that the other painting has very little of it, even though it’s almost the same age.

The reason the Mona Lisa has so much craquelure is because Leonardo was highly experimental, almost to the point of it being his biggest flaw. There were established painting techniques, and then there were Leonardo’s painting techniques.  The established painting techniques were created in order to insure longevity and quality, but Leonardo didn’t stick to any of them. This has made his work a ticking time bomb of deterioration. 

Don’t believe me, check it out:

This is how most people think The Last Supper looks

But this is actually a copy done by Andrea Solari in 1520.

The actual Last Supper looks like this:

The Last Supper has been painstakingly and teadiously restored, with conservators sometimes working on sections as small as 4 cm a day. To get to it you’ve got to walk through a series of airlocks (AIRLOCKS!?!?!) and they only allow 15 people at a time because the moisture from your breath and your skin particles will damage it. Despite all of the precautions and restoration, it still looks like that.

This is because Leonardo painted the last supper using highly experimental methods. He didn’t use the traditional wet-into-wet method that fresco painters used, and insead painted onto the dry plaster on the wall, meaning the paint did not chemically adhere.  Before he even died the painting had already begun to flake. It’s a miracle it’s still there at all.

They’ve done what restoration they can on The Last Supper because the painting will absolutely disappear if they don’t. The Mona Lisa, which is delicate, but much more stable, doesn’t need the same kind of attention. And, like many of his works, is just too delicate to touch, and the risk of doing irreparable damage to it is far too high. The Mona Lisa is insured for something like 800 million dollars, and that’s a lot of money to be ruined by one wrong brush stroke. (fun fact: the most expensive painting ever sold was also a Leonardo, the Salvator Mundi, and it went for 450 million dollars.)

Furthermore, there are probably only 20 or so authenticated Leonardo paintings in the whole world. If you look through the list, most of them aren’t even fully done by him, are disputed, or aren’t even finished.  It’s simply too difficult and too risky to restore the Mona Lisa, one of Leonardo’s only finished and mostly intact works, when there’s hardly any more of his paintings to fall back on.

Now the painting you see in the video above is 200 years old, not 600 years old, and I assure you, the conservators decided the risk to restore it was minimal (after extensive research, paint testing, x-raying, gamma radiation, etc.) and that the work they were doing was worth the risk based on the painting’s value.

Conservators make the decision all the time about how much they can do for a painting, because really, they have the ability to completely strip a painting of all varnish and glazes and just repaint the whole thing (which happens to a lot of badly damaged paintings, especially when there’s no way to save them - one of the very small museums in my area recently deaccessioned a Monet because it was barely original, and no one wants to look at a Monet that’s only 20% Monet’s work) - but doing that to the Mona Lisa, removing the artist’s hand from the most famous piece of artwork in history? Hell No.