National Gallery's artistic treasure hiding in plain sight

This is part of our series Hidden Treasures, where we delve into the storage rooms of museums across the National Capital Region to find out what weird and wonderful things they havetucked away there. We'll post a new story every Wednesday throughout the summer, and you can find them all onthe CBC Ottawa website.

Hundreds of thousands of visitorshave passed by the large baroque painting hanging in the National Gallery of Canada, but only a small number know its secret.

An Allegory of the Arts, completed in 1730 by Giuseppe Maria Crespi, is a painting within a painting. It portrays a blue-gowned womanat work at her easel, where she appears lost in the image of two figures she's created with her own brush.

But that'snot how Crespi first portrayed her.

It is part of the secret life of the picture.- Stephen Gritt, National Gallery of Canada

Hidden underneath the final layer of paint is an original draft portrayingan entirely different subject.

"Initially the figure of arts was a woman who wasn't doing anything. She was looking at you, the viewer," said Stephen Gritt, the museum's director of conservation and research.

"At a certain point during the painting, he clearly decided he needed to be more serious about it and he added a few years and a few pounds, and most importantly, he made her focus on the act of paintingand not you, the viewer."

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The subject's focus on her own work is key, Grittsaid.

"The changes he made were to make her face away from you, to ignore you and to make her fully engaged in the art of painting."

The gallery found the woman behind the woman using X-ray technology when it purchased the painting in 1996.

Gritt said other paintings in the gallery's collection hadsimilar false starts, but the Crespiis really a window into the artist's thinking.

"What you are really looking at is the way someone's brain is working," he said.

Gallery reveals painting's hidden secrets

8 years ago

Duration 1:51

Stephen Gritt, the director of conservation at the National Gallery of Canada, reveals what secrets are hiding beneath this Giuseppe Maria Crespi painting.

He said feminist art historians really enjoy this story.

"It is a dead white male who seems to be taking a female work more seriously," he said. "It is part of the secret life of the picture."