Well you see the picture now after cleaning has begun; cleaning meaning the
reduction of the old discoloured, degraded varnishes.
We do that principally by using solvents of known properties
that work on the varnish and not the paint
and that's guided by our understanding of the technique and materials,
working together the Scientific department
but here the gains are already becoming apparent
from that cleaning process. I think the principal thing to consider
with old varnishes is they both turn quite yellow and they also have their
own kind of fine craquelure and they could become rather hazy films that don't
really saturate the colors. That is, you can't see the darker colors very well.
You're kind of looking at them through a sort of net curtain and you can see the
changes, brought by reducing these varnishes from the cleaning I've done
already, are very dramatic.
Here you can see where I've done some cleaning both
in this area and in this area and I think those two cleaning tests show you
the key features of degraded varnishes and the key improvements that we get
from reducing them. So, of course, most obviously you can see that where the
varnishes have been reduced, the overall tonality of the picture is much less
yellow. The fingers are emerging rather pink instead of this kind of sallow
color and I'm sure that will become more evident as we move across the picture
but I think the thing here that's most significant and really very rewarding is
to see the range from light to dark that she's used in her modeling of forms
which gives it that whole sculptural presence.
Now these old varnishes when they degrade they turn yellow
and they turn foggy and so where they're over the
darker tones, the darker tones become quite a bit lighter. You can see that
here where there's a sort of hazy presence.
Whereas down here, where I've started reducing the old varnishes,
you can see the darker colors are much darker and
their range from light to dark is much enhanced and I think that helps you
understand how she's laid out the folds and help you understand what's in front
of what. So, for example, this area of dark drapery with the varnish reduced used to
look very much like this and that's a huge difference I think and I think if
you start to project that kind of change that gain of volume across the whole of
the image then you can really appreciate what she's doing the way that I'm sure
we'll see the sleeve projecting from this shadowed void beneath or the
turn of the sleeve or this gauzy-like material disappearing into the dark
areas all those kinds of things that the modeling of the wheels that moves back
in space with a little glint of high light coming through: these things are
the kinds of features that are in the painting that we don't see very well now.
In a small way you can already see the glint of the metal here and the range
from light to dark in this area where the varnish has been
reduced relative to that where the whole thing is slightly suppressed by both the
hazy film and the overall yellowing of the surface.
These are the kind of things we'll be looking for
as a gain from the restoration, from the initial cleaning.
Right, well you can see from the cleaning that there's an emergence of what look
like, well they are in fact, damages that you can't see in the rest of the picture
and that's because what I'm doing is I remove the old varnishes as I'm also
addressing the old restorations.
Typically a picture like this, some four hundred years old,
has been restored many times and we are faced both with the
condition of the picture itself and its restoration history.
So old restorations using less stable materials
typically have discolored and often, due to a kind of earlier sensibility
about what was appropriate for restoration,
they're often more generously applied than we would do today so they're much larger
the damages and we're finding that as these old retouchings along this
canvas seam, an original seam in Artemisia's support, are removed
we find the losses much much smaller than the old restorations so I'm getting rid
of those as I work across and we're unveiling quite a lot of Artemisia's
paint which had been hidden.
Part of that, as work progresses, we also continue our scientific investigations
working with my colleagues in the Scientific department.
So, my colleagues David and Joanna have been taking some samples
from the paint surface, very minuscule samples to help us understand the layer
structure of the accumulation of old varnishes from these many restorations
that have probably occurred to aid me in getting the best possible
saturation when I come to put my final varnish on.
So, as I've said, you're just seeing the early stages of the cleaning
and we're very excited about what's coming out of that cleaning.
When you think about the range of colors
and the kind of emphatic modeling: the dark values,
the voids, the projections, the use of the fall of light, the different kind
of textures she's depicting, all that, we're quite confident, is going to be
greatly enhanced by our efforts as the cleaning progresses and it should be
very exciting to see it unfold
you