My name is Paul Ackroyd from the National Gallery's Conservation Department and I'm just
going to briefly talk about this painting which is Paolo Uccello's route of San Romano or
'The Battle of San Romano' as it's also known. It's one of a series of three paintings. This one is
supposed to depict the early scenes of the battle in the morning. There's another painting
in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence which is the same battle going on in the afternoon and then there's
another one in the Louvre which is painted in the early evening. This arrived in
the National Gallery's collection in about 1857. It was last cleaned and restored in the early 1960s and in the
intervening time between then and now the varnish has yellowed quite significantly, as you can see
around here in these areas, these blue and purple areas here. Also the retouchings that they used
at that time have darkened quite a lot, they've changed. A lot of the original colours that Uccello
used have changed over time, particularly this sort of grey colours you can see here and over here.
This is the darkening of vermilion, the red pigment vermilion, so all of this would have looked
like this sort of red colour here. Similarly here, all this sort of, parts of this banner
here, which are painted red, would have been a very bright red and
there would have been quite a difference between the armour and the banner behind. A lot of these
greens have also darkened over time so there has been quite a lot of shift in the sort of
colours of the painting which we cannot do anything about during the restoration process. That's just
part of the ageing of the painting. This series of paintings was commissioned by the Bartolini family
in Florence. Originally they had arched tops and then sometime around about the mid 1480s, the
paintings were appropriated by Lorenzo Medici. He took them to his palace in Florence,
had someone put in pieces of new wood, and painted these in the corners and then cut off the
arched tops. That's happened to all three pictures. This has come up to conservation
for cleaning to remove some of the discoloured varnish, or all the discoloured varnish.
You can see that the marked differences that that cleaning process makes. The white horse
here, compared to this area which is not cleaned at all, which look quite yellowish and grey. The
other areas that have changed will change quite significantly is the silver leaf here, which
Uccello used in the armour. The abrasion in those areas have been been retouched with an aluminium
powdered paint in a synthetic medium. It doesn't look very good. It's changed quite a bit. It's
blanched. And so some of this will be retouched to a much better level than it was before,
so these will look a little bit more strongly three-dimensional again. This sort of area here
of abrasion, that will be have to be retouched, and all these losses across where the joins in the
panel are as well. Obviously this area of the flag here will come out to be a lot whiter in colour
than it is now, there's also quite a large damage in this area, well not so much a damage. This was a
piece where a new piece of wood was let in originally, so there'll be a lot of restoration that will
have to come off and be redone in that area. In this area here where the trees in the background
look quite fuzzy, that's because there's an awful lot of restoration there and that will have
to be removed and done a little bit more precisely than it was done in 1960. The main figures here
of Niccolò da Tolentino, the Florentine head of the forces, his face has lost an awful lot of modelling
as has his page's face as well, and we will have to do something about that modelling to make
it look a little bit more three-dimensional during the retouching. So you can see these two faces look
quite green. That's because they have the 'terra vert' under modelling showing. A lot of the top
layers of paint have been rubbed away in previous cleanings, so the modelling
will have to be re-established to some degree, not totally, that will be impossible, but they
will look less green once the the restoration is finished. So the cleaning process which is
pretty much halfway through now will take another month or two to complete and then it will go to
colleagues in the Scientific Department to do some sort of scientific investigation of parts
of the painting, and once that's complete the painting will come back for the retouching,
which will take about sort of a year to 18 months to complete. If you want to
find out more about this painting and others in the collection, please click here or here
and thank you very much for watching.