Hi, I'm Rachel Turnbull. I'm Senior Collections Conservator for Fine Art at English Heritage.
This is a painting by Botticelli, or from Botticelli's workshop, of the Virgin and Child
with Four Angels. And it's from the Wernher Collection, which is displayed at Ranger’s
House on Blackheath. Botticelli is a really popular artist, and
has been for a long time, and as a consequence of that there are lots of paintings that are
maybe not by him but by later followers or copyists. And we were never entirely sure,
or in recent years not entirely sure about exactly what our painting was in terms of
how close it was to him as an artist, and what we can say now after talking to lots
of experts and really examining this painting really closely in the studio: we now are fairly
sure that it is definitely from the workshop of Botticelli and so made in his studio space
by his assistants - perhaps not by the hand of the Master himself, but we're not too worried
about that. We think it was made in his workshop and the
person who purchased this work would have been buying, as far as they were concerned,
a Botticelli. We used lots of different scientific approaches
when we were investigating this painting. We look very closely under the microscope
before we even start. We carried out an X-ray on the painting, which
shows the panel construction. We used infrared reflectography, which shows us the initial
underdrawing, or at least some of the initial underdrawing, that was done in the studio
before this painting was put together. It may not have captured all of the underdrawing,
there's possibly some things that we can't see, but it does show quite a lot of broad
sketching-out and painting-in of the composition before the paint was applied.
I went out to Florence to the Uffizi to see the prime version, and spent him a long time
in the gallery in front of the picture along with the hundreds of members of the general
public, which was frankly an amazing experience; to stand in front of it for so long, knowing
that I had a little version of the big picture at home in the studio.
If you imagine a work like this being produced in the 15th century, it wasn't something that
one person could do on their own so popular artists like Botticelli would have had a large
workshop with lots of different craftsmen. Maybe somebody preparing the panels, people
preparing pigments, and people doing the drafting and the painting, and he wouldn't have worked
on all of the pieces himself. In our case, the painting would have been
made by his assistants, but it would have still been sold from that workshop as a Botticelli
and the people who bought it would have understood what that meant.
They weren't paying for the most expensive piece of work, but equally they were paying
for something from the Botticelli workshop. It's really interesting restoring a painting
of this age, from around 1480 or 1490, because you have hundreds of years of different restorations
and interventions that have been made, and actually what it feels like is a kind of mini-microscopic
archaeology as you begin to peel back those later restorations, which have probably been
made in good faith, but which are now not doing any great service to the picture, to
get back as close as you can to the original intention of the artist.
When you're working on a painting like this, you're with it for literally hundreds of hours.
And you do become incredibly connected to it. The funny thing is though as a conservator
you’re connecting with the physicality of it, not so much the subject matter, but the
brushstrokes and the… and the wood and the paint.
It's really amazing to work on a painting by Botticelli. When you do art history at
school or university, it's such an iconic name and suddenly to have one that you are
really close to and working on with your own hands is quite an extraordinary experience.