And you also, it becomes your painting as well. So I've got a few paintings in the Gallery
that are mine, and this is going to be one of them,
this is going to be my painting. Nelly: You get a really strong sense of ownership, don't you?
You do, you get so close to it, you feel like there's something of you.
Yeah, no, that's that's very true actually.
Which other paintings are yours in the Gallery? Is there a Britta tour?
I don't know that there's a Britta tour, I don't think I've done that many, I've done
more panel jobs in some ways than
sort of full cleaning and restoration and structural work, because I do both, I do the
cleaning and restoration, and I do a lot of panel work, and I've also got the Piero di Cosimo over
there that I've been doing the full treatment on, and I cleaned that and I repaired the panel,
actually made a new support for that one, and I'm in the middle of doing the restoration work,
so we often have a couple of things that we're working on at the same time, so that
if we need to wait for things that go on in the Gallery, like sometimes we're waiting
for Photography, sometimes we're doing work with the Scientific Department, and so we need to wait
for results, so it's quite good to have a couple of different things on the go at the same time.
It was a revelation to me when I started this career but I'm not sure that everyone always
thinks about it this way, that paintings are not static objects, they change constantly and they age
just like people do, and you know we take care of them to make sure that we sort of minimise
how they sort of degrade, how they change, so they don't fall off their canvases, you
know, we want them to to be around for future generations to look at them and
in Scientific it's a big responsibility to sort of
understand them better so that they don't fall apart. But it's a really interesting job and I
get to work with paintings like this and it's just so exciting. I love it.
Nelly: That swab is just like - the colours that are coming off it
are so intense! Britta: I know, it's all sorts of colours, it's sort of like a
bit grey, and then it's a bit yellow - - should be wearing my head loops. Nelly: Juicy.
There are so many layers on this painting. It was polished with wax. That might be the
most recent coating that's been put on the surface. And then before that it had been
consolidated several times, and that's where the paint flakes have been glued back down again, so
there's likely to be some glue on the surface as well. And then there are sort of varnishes from the
19th century and before, and in between all of those things there are dirt layers
and crusts that have built up over the years.
In this region I'm just removing some of the upper layers of
varnish. You can see the transition between an area that we've taken off these upper layers, and this
is an area that's uncleaned, and it makes such an enormous difference, I think, to the clarity and
the depth of the paint that we can see that's being revealed by removing
some of this discolouration from on top of it. Revealing lots of lumps here in this bit.
More and more lumps.
It would be interesting to know why they have formed.
It's very unusual. Nellie: I would also like to know this.
The samples that we take are really really small, and I mean
even compared with sort of archaeological samples where we're dealing with tiny tiny tiny amounts.
When I say half a pinhead it really is half a pinhead size, so you very reliant on
the sample that you've taken, the particular area that you have, and whether or not it's
representative of the larger thing, and obviously with paintings like these, we want to take the
absolute minimum amount of original material. It's very critical to not make holes in paintings.
So we make, we get the most out of what we sample, which is usually very little, and hopefully we can
gain a lot of information and that makes it worth it, hopefully, to us and to you.
That's such an unusual surface phenomenon because it doesn't fall into any of the categories that
we normally have for these sort of surface degradations. It's not coming from below,
it's not a crust that's formed at the surface,
it's just a bit perplexing. So this is the sort of fluorescence that we get using U.V.
light, and you can see that there's a sort of like a greenish cast over the whole of the surface, and
that is the varnish layer that's over the whole of the painting. You can see as well where
there are old retouchings that are masking some of that fluorescence, and if we come down here, to
where I've done a little bit of cleaning, I don't know that you'd be able to pick this up on the
camera, but there's a line across here, and that's where I've taken off the upper layer of varnish,
and these little blobby bits are where some of those lumps that we've been talking about are.
You can see that there's still a fluorescence over the whole of the surface where I've been cleaning,
but it's just quite different in certain places because of where there are different
sort of surface phenomena going on. But it's very helpful to us to sort of like see what level
the cleaning is at. So this was painted for the church of Sant'Agostino in um Asciano,
and we think that this is a depiction of Asciano here in the bottom of the painting.
It was painted for the church, and then at some point it was dismembered, and taken into all
the different parts of the altarpiece, and put away. Presumably they decided that
they wanted either a different altarpiece, or they wanted something more modern in its place. And
that happens a lot actually, a lot of altarpieces are just sort of dismembered and sold in sort of
separate pieces. So this was obviously taken to pieces and then stored in the woodshed for a while,
where it was then later found by this Sienese art historian. "It was once located in the
church of Sant'Agostino and afterwards in the woods store of the Augustinian fathers
where in 1800 I saw it and rescued what remained of it from complete destruction.
Now the remains from the main compartments that the altarpiece contained the very beautiful
'Assumption of the Virgin' escorted by angels that look indeed as if they come from paradise."
Unfortunately we don't know what's happened to a lot of the other parts of the altarpiece, some
bits are still remaining in different collections. It was reassembled a few years ago
but there are many pieces that are still missing, or perhaps were actually destroyed at that time.
I think so because often they were actually sort of like nailed to the altarpiece,
so we know that this altarpiece, from the other parts
of the altarpiece, my colleague Rachel Billinge examined it with Luke Syson
a few years ago, and they actually worked out how the altarpiece was put together.
There are sort of like dowels in the sides of this panel that fit to the flanking saints,
and also I think they worked out that the battens that are on the back of this
actually go all the way along, and would have would have supported those other pieces as well.
So when you take an altarpiece apart you're actually really carving quite a big
construction up, and often the joins between the different painted elements often just actually had
gilded pieces that were nailed in or attached, and and so by taking the different paintings to pieces,
you take off some of those gilded pieces of frame, and often they're destroyed
at the time. There would have been quite a few of those elements. Most of the paintings
of this age and this sort of genre, they weren't what they are now, and
they would have looked very different from how we see them, as these sort of standalone
altarpieces. That's not how they were originally made or intended. They were much bigger ensembles.
Daylight is the most helpful light to use, and I guess it's the light that most
of these things were painted in, so it's the light that we should be trying to see them in.
A painting like this would
have been displayed in a church with lots of candles, yeah.
With the gilding that's why, you know, they would glean, the gold, but
the gold is really important, actually, and that's one of the reasons why
the varnish wouldn't have been applied to the gold. It would sort of go around
the gilding and just sort of like saturate the paint film, but
the gilding wouldn't have been varnished, because it would have
sort of like altered over time, and they would have known that, that it would have,
it wouldn't have allowed that same sort of like gleam and glint in all different directions that
a sheer piece of burnished gold does. And that's one of the problems you
have now with restoring things with this amount of gold on them, it's very difficult to actually
get that uniform surface back again, particularly once they've been varnished, and this, although
we're talking about the fact that the original wouldn't have been varnished, it has been varnished
since, so actually, working with that gilding and trying to make sure that we maintain
a sort of like a really nice surface sheen over the gilding is really quite difficult. I'll need the
block soon. [Nellie: ] You can imagine that in candlelight with the gold, and with the angels sort of dancing,
that they would they would look like they were dancing, almost they would sort of flicker to life,
and the candles. [Britta: ] Yeah, and then there's all the the mordant gilding over the paint as well,
so there would be little areas that would be sort of like flicking,
looking out all over the place. There's little bits of gold,
these are all little bits of gilding all around these areas, and then there's all the halos.
This is ultramarine. I mean that's amazing. It's so well preserved. Because some of
the colours in this are absolutely stunning, I mean, actually, it's, on the whole there are some,
you know, there are a few weird things going on, but on the whole, it's in very good condition,
we've got some really beautiful, really beautiful passages with very little damage, so
actually, when we finished the treatment to bring this back to sort of something akin
to how how it was when it was first painted, it's going to be amazing, because it's going to have so
much more depth and clarity to the figures. I mean these angels really are going to be sort of like
dancing, bringing the Virgin up. At the moment it's had some of the layers of varnish
taken off, but it's not saturated. But if I wet it out with some white spirit, I think you can see
how amazing it's going to look when it's varnished up again.
Again, I was talking about the sort of like the depth and clarity
of the painting that's been recovered by taking off those upper layers of varnish, but I
think you can see once we saturate it again with a modern varnish that's not going to discolour
in that way, I think you'll see that we're going to get such an amazing
result. It's a remarkable picture. It's really beautiful.
The more you look at it the more you realise what's in there.