I'm Sara. I'm an art conservator
and the director of conservation
at Center Art Studio in New York City.
Today, I'm going to walk you through how we restore
a 16th-century sculpture of St. George.
This sculpture is owned by a collector in New York City,
and he brought the sculpture to us
when it was damaged in transit from Barcelona.
The first thing we do
when we get an object into the studio to restore
is perform an initial inspection.
So, we want to understand
what is the current condition of the object.
And once we understand that,
then we are able to start formulating a treatment plan.
This is a sculpture of St. George slaying a dragon.
The lore is that the villagers had to sacrifice somebody
to this dragon every year.
And then one year it became the princess of the town
that was going to be sacrificed.
And so St. George the soldier came in,
slayed the dragon, saved the princess,
and, you know, has been revered and is a saint.
This is a depiction of St. George,
but it actually has the face and the hair
of King Ferdinand II.
Clearly, it's very well carved.
It's polychrome, gilded.
It is a significant piece that would've been well funded.
After we come up with a treatment plan,
the first thing that we do
is separate the figure, dragon, and base,
and we are going to clean
each one of those components separately.
It has a very, very heavy, glossy varnish on top of it,
which just is unnecessary.
It comes across as heavy handed.
We can tell that there's dirt
sitting under the top varnish layer.
So that means that whoever last varnished this piece
and worked on it didn't fully clean it properly.
They put new coats of material over dirt
and bad restorations.
We start out with solvent gels,
and we apply the gel to the surface,
and the gel holds the solvent
against the surface.
So it allows it to penetrate a little bit better.
When the gel's on the surface, we come in with a swab
and kind of agitate the gel to turn it over
to make sure that, you know, fresh, clean gel
is making contact with that area that we're cleaning.
The most difficult component to clean
and get the varnish off of is the base,
just because it is so thick and heavy and waxy.
So that takes a bit more time and care to remove.
We look with a UV flashlight at the surface.
And if we see green reflecting back,
that indicates to us that there is
a yellowed varnish or coating on that surface.
It's typical to have us actually clean with a flashlight,
so we can see where we're removing those green areas.
The face and the hands are, they're very dirty,
and with a proper cleaning,
they're going to really transform
from kind of a dull, murky color
to a bright skin color
that really is dramatically different
than how it looked pre-cleaning.
When we remove that gel that's cleaned off all those layers,
we see, in that cleaned area, we see old crackle lines.
And that crackle is desirable
because it just indicates the age of the piece.
And you want to see,
you'd expect an object from the 1500s
to have lots of variation and age to it.
So once you remove those layers,
you start to see the complexity of the surface,
and it just takes on a whole new substantial feeling.
When art is in transit,
that's when it's really at most risk of incurring damage.
And unfortunately, that's just what happened in this case.
It couldn't support itself.
I mean, it's meant to be a freestanding object,
and it could not vertically support itself.
To do the structural repairs on this figure,
we have to remove
the iron rods that are going through
the feet of St. George
and into the dragon.
Those are held into the sculpture
with some kind of bonding glue,
epoxy resin. We're not exactly sure what that is.
So we need to break that bond
in order to get those rods out.
This is obviously a very tricky, delicate procedure,
because we are going to have to remove those rods,
but we really don't want to cause any further damage.
So we test a variety of methods.
So we will chip off a bit of that compound
and put it in a vial of water or solvents
and do a test to see,
we can see if that little chip dissolves.
So we were able to determine that
it would soften in water, but it didn't dissolve it.
So we could use water to help us.
But we're still going to have to use drills
and more mechanical approaches.
So we sort of break away that old epoxy
that's holding the rods into the sculpture,
and we use vise grips and clamps as we go.
We add a bit of water while we're wiggling the rod
to break that bond.
Ultimately, we switch out those tools for a drill.
At first, we use a regular drill bit
to try to break it up a bit,
and then we have to switch out to an extra-long drill bit
because these recesses are actually very deep.
So we use an extra-long drill bit
to drill out that compound,
and that ultimately allows us to remove the rod.
Then we have to dig out the holes,
the recesses where the rods were,
in order to remove all of the epoxy and just start fresh.
So we use a drill with a Forstner bit
to enlarge the holes to about the diameter of an inch
in order to have enough space
to take the new stainless-steel rods
and the epoxy that we're going to put in.
The iron rods that we took out were in very deep,
deeper than they needed to be.
So we are going to plug those holes
with little pieces of wooden dowel
that will use fish glue to glue into the recess
just to make the hole a little bit shallower.
It works really well. It's a natural material.
It binds really well. It dries clear.
It's literally just made from condensed fish.
In order to prep the sculpture
to receive the rods,
we had to repair the broken foot.
So we used conservation epoxies
to reattach the broken components of the foot together
to make it one piece again.
And then once it's solid,
it's in a position to then take the new rods.
We test-fit them into St. George and the dragon,
and we hold up the sculpture so we can align
where everything is going to fit together.
And then we'll mark on the dragon
where the stainless-steel rods meet it.
We use our very old, but very handy, drill press
to drill out those recesses that we've marked on the dragon.
So where we've marked those circles,
that's where we're going to drill.
And that will just create the recess
that will allow the rods to sit onto the dragon.
Then we attach the figure to the dragon.
At that point, St. George and the dragon become one object,
so they are bonded together.
Then we have to hold it in position.
So we'll tie up the sculpture
and make sure it stays in a stable position,
ideally overnight, while the epoxy fully cures
and becomes really hard.
The next morning when we come back to the studio,
we can untie it, and it will hold its own,
and it will be stable and able to stand up.
After the structural repairs are done,
we apply a final coat of shellac to the entire object.
We use a thin coat of shellac.
We can always add more and build it up,
but we always start with a thin coat and see how that looks.
Typically, you don't need a very heavy coat.
It's unnecessary, and it just presents better
if there's less sitting on top of the surface.
This was a significant project.
There was a lot of work that went into it.
So there were weeks of active work.
I'd say about five or six of our conservators
had their hand in restoring St. George.
I'm very satisfied with this restoration.
I think work we did was not insignificant.
It was a major undertaking.
It was, I think, a very successful project,
and we all feel very accomplished
that we were able to restore it
and get it back to this point.
So we're very happy with it.
It's just beautiful, and it has a very strong,
powerful presence to it when you see it in person.