Cleaning the 'Lost Altarpiece' that was found in a woodshed | Art Restoration | National Gallery

and you also it becomes your painting as well yeah so i've got a few paintings in the gallery that are mine yeah um and this is working on them so much yeah this is going to be one of them this is going to be my painting you get a really strong sense of ownership don't you you do you get so close to it yeah do you feel like there's something of you yeah no that's that's very true actually which other paintings are yours is there's i don't know that there's a brit at all i don't think i've done that many um i've done more um i've done more panel jobs in some ways than sort of full cleaning and restoration and structural work because i do both i do the cleaning and restoration and i do a lot of panel work and i've also got pierrot de cosimo over there that i've been doing the a full treatment on and i cleaned that and i repaired the panel actually made a new support for that one and i'm in the middle of doing the restoration work so we often have a couple of things um that we're working on at the same time so that if we um need to wait for things that go on in the gallery like sometimes we're waiting for photography sometimes we're doing work with the scientific department and so we need to wait for results so it's quite good to have a couple of different things on the go at the same time it was a revelation to me when i started this career but i'm not sure that everyone always thinks about it this way that paintings are not static objects they change constantly and they age just like people do and you know we take care of them to make sure that we sort of minimize how they sort of degrade how they change so they don't fall off their canvases you know we want them to to be around for future generations to look at them and uh in scientific it's a big responsibility to sort of understand them better so that they don't fall apart but it's a really interesting job and i you know get to work with paintings like this and it's just so exciting i love it [Music] that swab is just like the colors that are coming off it are so intense yeah i know it's all sorts of colors it's sort of like a bit gray and then it's a bit yellow yeah i should be wearing my head loops juicy there are so many layers on this painting it was polished with wax that might be the most recent coating that's been put on the surface and then before that it had been consolidated several times and that's where their paint flakes have been glued back down again so there's likely to be some glue on the surface as well and then there are sort of varnishes from the 19th century and and before and in between all of those things there are dirt layers and crusts that have built up over the years in this region i'm just i'm just removing some of the upper layers of varnish you can see the transition between an area that we've taken off these upper layers and this is an area that's uncleaned and it makes such an enormous difference i think to the clarity and the depth of the of the paint that we can we can see that's being revealed by removing some of this some of this discoloration from on top of it revealing lots of lumps here in this bit more and more lumps yeah it would be interesting to know why they have formed oh it's very unusual i would also like to know this yeah the samples that we take are really really small and i mean even compared with sort of archaeological samples where we're dealing with tiny tiny tiny amounts when i say half a pinhead it really is half a pinhead size uh so you very reliant on the sample that you've taken the particular area that you have and whether or not it's representative of the larger thing and obviously with paintings like these we want to take the absolute minimum amount of original material it's very critical to to not make holes in paintings so we make we get the most out of what we sample which is usually very little and hopefully we can gain a lot of information and that makes it worth it hopefully to us and to you that's such an unusual surface phenomenon because it doesn't fall into any of the categories that we normally have for these sort of surface degradations it's not coming from below it's not um a crust that's formed at the surface it's just a bit perplexing so this is this is the sort of fluorescence that we get using uv light and you can see that there's a sort of like a greenish cast over the whole of the surface and that is the um the varnish layer that's over the whole of the painting you can see as well where there are old retouchings that are masking some of that fluorescence and if we come down here to where i've done a little bit of cleaning i don't know that you'd be able to pick this up on the camera but there's a line across here and that's where i've taken off the upper layer of varnish and these little lobby bits are where some of those lumps that we've been talking about are and you can see that there's still a fluorescence over the whole of the surface where i've been cleaning but it's just quite different in certain places because of where there are different sort of surface phenomena going on but it's very helpful to us to sort of like see what level um the cleaning is that um so this is painted for the church of santo casino in um ashano and we think that this is a depiction of ashano um here in the bottom of the painting it was painted for the church and then it was at some point it was dismembered and taken into all the different parts of the of the old piece and put away presumably they um decided that they wanted either a different altarpiece or they wanted something more modern in its place um and that happens a lot actually a lot of altar pieces are just sort of dismembered and sold in sort of separate pieces so this was obviously taken to pieces and then stored in the woodshed for a while where it was then later found by this cne's art historian it was once located in the church of santa agustino and afterwards in the woods store of the augustinian fathers where in 1800 i saw it and rescued what remained of it from complete destruction now the remains from the main compartments that the altarpiece contained the very beautiful assumption of the virgin escorted by angels that look indeed as if they come from paradise yeah unfortunately we don't know what's happened to a lot of the other parts of the oldspace some bits are still remaining in different collections and it was um reassembled a few years ago but there are many pieces that are still missing or perhaps were actually destroyed at that time yeah i think so i think so because often they were actually sort of like nailed to the altarpiece so we know that this altered piece from the other three other parts of the altarpiece um my colleague rachel billings examined it with luke zeiss and a few years ago and they actually worked out how the altarpiece was put together and there are sort of like dowels in the sides of this panel that fit to the flanking saints um and so we and and also i think they worked out that the battens that are on the back of this actually go all the way along and would have would have supported those other pieces as well so when you take an alt piece apart you're actually you're really carving quite a big construction up and often the joins between the different painted elements often just actually had gilded pieces that were nailed in or attached and and so by taking the different paintings to pieces you take off some of the um some of those those gilded pieces of frame and often they're destroyed um at the time and there would have been quite a few of those elements most of the paintings of this age and this sort of genre they they weren't what they are now and they were they they would have looked very very different from how we see them as these sort of standalone altarpieces um that's not how they were originally made or intended they were much bigger ensembles but daylight is is the most helpful light to use um and i guess it's the light that most of these things were painted in so it's the light that we should be trying to see them in although there's a painting like this in there this would have been in a church with lots of candles yeah well that's why you know with the gilding that's why you know they they would glean the gold but the gold is really important actually um and that's one of the reasons why the varnish wouldn't have been applied to the gold it would sort of go around the gilding and just sort of like saturate the paint film but the gilding wouldn't have been wouldn't have been varnished because it it would have that that would have sort of like altered over time and they would have known that that it would have it wouldn't have allowed that same sort of like gleam and glint in all different directions that just sort of like a sheer piece of burnished gold does and that's one of the problems you have now with restoring things with this amount of gold on them it's very difficult to actually get that uniform surface back again particularly once they've been varnished and this although we're talking about the fact that the original wouldn't have been varnished it has been varnished since so actually working with that um with that gilding and trying to make sure that we maintain a sort of like a really nice um surface sheen over the gilding is really quite difficult another block soon you can imagine that in candlelight with the gold and with the angels sort of dancing that they would they would look like they were dancing almost they would sort of flicker to life and the candles yeah and then there's all the the mordant gilding um over the paint as well so there would be little areas that would be sort of like flicking looking out all over the place there's lit little bits of gold these are all little bits of gilding all around these areas and then there's all the halos yeah this is ultramarine i mean that's amazing it's so well preserved so well because some of the colors in this are absolutely stunning i mean actually it's on the whole there are some you know there are a few weird things going on um but on the whole it's in very good condition yeah you know we've got some really beautiful really beautiful passages with very little damage so actually when we finished the treatment to bring this back to you know sort of something akin to how how it was when it was first painted it's going to be amazing because it's going to have so much more depth and clarity to the figures i mean these angels really are going to be sort of like dancing yeah bringing the virgin up at the moment it's um it's had some of the layers of varnish taken off but it's not saturated but if i am wet out with some white spirit i think you can see how amazing it's going to look when it's varnished up again i mean again i was talking about the sort of like the depth and clarity of the uh of the of the painting that's been um recovered by taking off those upper layers of varnish but i think you can see once we saturate it again with a modern varnish that's not going to discolor um in that way i think you'll see that we're going to get such an amazing result it's a remarkable picture it's really beautiful yeah the more you look at it the more you realize what's in there yeah absolutely

Channel: The National Gallery

Views: 55,100

Keywords: fineart, artgallery, painting, museum, arthistory, European Art, The National Gallery, london

Id: Yj7VtPAPrg8

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 31 2021