Look at a painting and what do you see – a great work of art or a textile? Many of the old masters from the Renaissance onwards are painted on canvas, which is in fact stretched hand-woven linen. New research done by a Dutch weaver living in Portugal shows that far from being plain woven canvas, pictures by some of the best-known old masters like Caravaggio, Titian, El Greco, and Velasquez were painted onto complex linen weaves.
Helena Loermans uses the latest X-ray technology to see the weaves that have been hidden for centuries and then reconstructs them, painstakingly, thread by thread, and recreates them on her loom. Jo talked to her about her project and how she discovered the complex fabrics lying beneath the paint.
