Bank of America backs Titian restoration at London’s National Gallery
A major Titian canvas is set for conservation next month, as Bank of America’s annual art conservation program expands its reach across museums and monuments in Europe, North America, and Asia. The 2026 grants support 18 projects, including the restoration of Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne” (1520–23) at the National Gallery in London, where the work will be removed from display during construction in the research center.
The painting, one of the National Gallery’s best-known holdings, depicts a scene drawn from the Roman poets Ovid and Catullus. Conservators will place it on a new fabric support, reversing a 1960s intervention that attached the canvas to a rigid backing. They will then remove the work from its secondary support and address paint loss and other deterioration, according to a Bank of America statement.
The program’s scale is considerable. Since its launch in 2010, Bank of America says it has helped conserve more than 15,000 objects in 40 countries. This year’s grants also support the long-running treatment of Rembrandt van Rijn’s “The Night Watch” (1642) at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where the painting is now entering a new phase that includes removing aged varnish and earlier overpainting inside a glass chamber visible to the public.
Other projects range from the ceremonial to the fragile. At Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, 269 cast bronze palms in the Salle d’Attique will be vacuum dusted and coated in protective wax under the supervision of the Centre des Monuments Nationaux. In Japan, “Gaki Zōshi (Scroll of Hungry Ghosts)” at the Tokyo National Museum will be stabilized and its colors restored after long-term deterioration raised fears that the image could be lost entirely.
Additional grants will help repair Henri Matisse’s “La Négresse” paper collage (1952) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, clean and stabilize 52 paintings by Francisco Laso de los Ríos at the Museo de Arte de Lima, and fix Alice Rahon’s “Juggler” (1946) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, a Surrealist sculpture considered too unstable for display.
The application guidelines require recipient institutions to report their findings to Bank of America after conservation. Advisory panel members include Laura Rivers of the J. Paul Getty Museum and Nick Dorman of Seattle Art Museum. A spokesperson declined to disclose the full funding figure, but the program’s footprint suggests a sustained commitment to the slow, exacting work of keeping art visible.
