The entire room here at Longthorpe is covered
with wall paintings and the imagery is amazing.
There are religious scenes and there are scenes referencing royalty.
There's an amazing survival
of a wheel of the five senses.
The paintings were made around 1330
by a man called Robert Thorpe
and this was a private space in his house
that he used to impress his clients and his friends.
Due to the age of the paintings there are places
where there is complete loss
but overall the survival of this scheme
in this space is an incredible thing.
We're undertaking an amazing project
with the Courtauld Institute of Art
to examine and treat the
fantastic survival of wall paintings
in this amazing space.
Since the paintings were revealed in the 1940s
they have been treated on numerous occasions
If you look across the walls
there are multiple types of different repairs.
Before we can treat a painting like this
we need to understand
from the structure upwards
how the paintings were made.
We need to understand the fabric, how that was constructed,
what materials were used,
how the stones were
bonded together because the
impact of those materials
follow through into the wall painting itself.
And we need to be aware of how those layers interact
with each other in order to conserve them properly.
We have a whole range of new
scientific techniques that we can use,
which allow us to investigate
the paintings without being invasive.
In other words we don't need to take physical samples.
Imaging techniques such as multispectral imaging
allow us to visualise things
that we can't see with the naked eye.
We can use a portable microscope on site
for looking at and characterising
the original materials of the painting.
When we're making our new repairs
we want those materials to be
of similar strength properties.
We look at their grain size,
grain shape, grain distribution,
so we're very careful in our selection process of those materials.
These paintings are painted on to a lime plaster
and on to a lime wash ground,
so we are also using lime based products.
Conservators and restorers in the past
used materials that were
available to them at the time, and they were
working to the best of their ability at the time.
But sometimes some of those materials are inappropriate for the paintings
and they can cause potential harm to them.
In this scheme, we have a wax layer that's been put on it.
That distorts their appearance, the wax
has taken in dirt, it's discoloured itself,
so that's one of the things we want to address in this work phase.
We have to be extra careful
because in taking those materials out
we could potentially destabilise the original materials.
We use specifically reformulated repairs
to help stabilise vulnerable edges of painting
as we are gradually and slowly removing the previous fills.
When we're investigating these paintings
we find out so much about them.
We might find thumbprints from the person
who was putting that plaster in all that time ago.
We find paint splashes
and mistakes in the painting.
It gives you a glimpse of the people
who made these paintings seven hundred years ago
and gradually, before your eyes, they start coming back to life again.
By the end of this exciting project we will
have stabilised the vulnerable areas.
We will have also improved the legibility
of this amazing scheme.
We're asking for public support
to help us preserve these beautiful wall paintings for future generations.