At the start of the project, a fundamental, unanswered question conservators wished to research was whether the Vertumnus and Pomona painting served as a model for tapestries produced by the French tapestry manufacturer Beauvais or if the painting served as a cartoon—the pattern physically placed beneath a low-warp (basse-lisse) loom for weavers to follow in creating their work. Records from Beauvais indicate that seven Vertumnus and Pomona tapestries were produced by their weavers, one of which is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Technical study by our team of conservators has been key to deepening our understanding of this relationship to tapestry manufacture as well as the painting’s subsequent history, and has guided the course of its treatment.
While Vertumnus and Pomona was being cleaned, the conservators also studied an X-radiograph of the painting in order to understand the structural complexities hidden from the naked eye. The X-radiograph revealed that, while the original fabric was stitched together from two pieces in preparation for painting, the painting was subsequently cut after its creation. A long vertical incision, which carefully curves around Vertumnus’s hand, divides the canvas in two. The widths of the two resulting sections are typical for the strips or bandes used under the warps in low-warp weaving. Eighteenth-century weavers specialized in particular tapestry elements such as foliage and flesh, and the cut around the hand would allow the completion of the figure of Vertumnus. This finding that the painting had at one time been separated into two pieces in a manner calculated to maintain the integrity of the figures gave definitive proof that our painting is, indeed, the cartoon used to produce tapestries.