What Lies Beneath: New Tools for direct exploration of Peter Paul Rubens's "The Fall of Phaeton"

As it appears today, Peter Paul Rubens’s The Fall of Phaeton at the National Gallery of Art depicts the dramatic story at a critical moment. But what one finds when looking below the paint surface gives us far more insight into Rubens’s decisions than the final painting can describe. In researching this painting Melanie Gifford, Research Conservator at the NGA, used technical analysis to characterize three distinct stages of Rubens’s composition. Comparing these stages to other works by Rubens sheds new light on the artist’s changing goals for the painting. These findings were presented in the Journal of Netherlandish Art (Rubens’s Invention and Evolution: Material Evidence in The Fall of Phaeton, JHNA Vol. 11.2), using a newly interactive format for JHNA articles developed by JHNA Digital Humanities Developer, Jennifer Henel. Our goal for this presentation was to bring the reader into the experience of intimate study of the painting itself. We chose IIIF technology in a newly adapted image viewer to give readers direct access to the painting and technical documentation. We hope that, after reading the article, users will continue to use these viewing tools to make further discoveries. Our presentation will discuss the project from art historical and technical perspectives, highlighting what we have learned from such a rich collaboration, and consider what this project can contribute to the DAH field.