We've become used to looking at the old masters through the murky filter of darkening varnish. Bright colours can come as something of a shock, as is the case with the still contentious restoration of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling. That, however, is not the problem with Levent Tuncer's replacement panels for University Church on St Stephen's Green.
Tuncer's panels are in a sense replacements of replacements. In 1515 Pope Leo X commissioned a set of cartoons for tapestries for the Sistine Chapel. When, 150 years ago, John Henry Newman set about embellishing the interior of the new University Church, he sent two Frenchmen, Sublet and Soulacroix, to Rome to produce painted copies of the Raphael cartoons.
Their efforts are buried under discolouring layers of some unspecified substance. So Tuncer was commissioned to make versions of the Raphael cartoons, of which seven out of 10 survive.
What he has produced falls between two stools. They are neither faithful enough to the originals to sit comfortably in their context, nor novel enough to count as an interesting reinterpretation. It is as if he took the term "cartoon" a little too much to heart, and his treatment tends more towards Marvel Comics than high art.
