These easels are absolute beasts.
Great.
The thing that led to this recent campaign of treatment was the fact that the panel had a small
split in the back that had never been properly repaired. There'd been some retouching on the
losses, but without really dealing with the structural problem itself
My colleague Lynne Harrison did a careful repair of the panel. I'm just going to spin it around
so you can see that this small split
on a panel which, otherwise, is in very good condition. It's got its original thickness
It had actually come and sprung apart and so Lynne inserted a small thin slip of
of poplar, of similar density to that used by the painter, into the loss
because we can't spring it together where the wood is actually sprung. We can't pull it together
so we fill it with a little bit of poplar and work on the level of the split, that is to say,
getting this as close together as we can, in terms of not having any kind of step between
the two segment sections of the panel, and then bringing it all back together to allow me to do
a shallow fill on top of her repair, onto which I will do my retouching
Hi I'm Larry Keith, I'm the Head of Conservation and Keeper, and I'd like to talk to you today about
the treatment of this weird and wonderful work by an artist called Piero di Cosimo. It's a nymph and
[satyr], it's a painting from the mid-1490s one of two that we have in our Collection,
and very typical of him. He's an artist who Vasari described as being very very
eccentric, and whether or not, however accurate that may be, he certainly is
masterful I think at making these kind of poetic dreamlike landscapes and with
these stories that are a little bit fantastical. There's all things about him being a pyrophobic
He was afraid of fire and so he didn't like cooking according to Vasari. Vasari of course is
famous for embroidering anecdotes and it's impossible to know just how accurate they are, but
he talks about Piero di Cosimo being someone who liked to boil 50 eggs at a time so he would have
his meals ready to go for a long time without having to cook very often. Things like that. We
don't know how accurate that is, but the received tradition of him being a slightly eccentric person
I think sits comfortably with our appreciation of the fantasy element we see in his works. We're not
entirely sure exactly what the subject is other than obviously it's a nymph, a dying nymph, mourned
over by a satyr, and typical kind of animals, flora and fauna, that Piero di Cosimo was particularly
fascinated with and very adept at. Whether it's the beautifully observed vegetation, pelicans,
other animals. The treatment now is at the stage where the cleaning's finished
and I've just started the retouching very recently. This is the image. Under ultraviolet light all
of our retouchings will show because of the different layer structure and where they sit
above the varnish. They typically absorb the light and show dark so these dark spots
are modern retouchings carefully applied just over the damages. The painting's in very good condition
in general, and a lot of the tiny losses you see across the surface are interesting because they
seem to be related to Piero di Cosimo's painting technique itself. If we come a little closer, look
a little bit, you can see the first drawing that he did, very bold sketching, underdrawing,
which you can see showing through the painting in many many areas because of the naturally
increasing transparency of the oil paint medium he used. It seems also that in many cases whatever
the medium of this underdrawing is, the paint itself, Piero's paint, hasn't stuck very well
to it. If you look closely, you can see areas where the paint over the underdrawing has developed its
own rather pronounced crackled or slightly raised, and in other parts it simply flaked off. Here, where
these dog's legs had been extended and then changed to make the to depict the dog kneeling,
you can see the first drawn legs below and the paint of the overlying landscape has pinged off
exactly where the ink is. We see that time and time again, here along the contour of her leg,
other areas as well, and so really this is the kind of picture where
we're trying to just take out the kind of snow storm of tiny white losses and in so doing I think,
you know, the volumes and relationships that are always there will be revealed as the work
progresses and it'll be very satisfying thing to do, because it's such a wonderful attractive image
There's another very interesting, not unique to him, but certainly a very remarkable
element about this. If you look closely in the sky, you can see it's got hundreds of fingerprints
where he's actually put the very expensive and carefully measured out blue pigment, the glaze,
across the top. As he feathers it down he's touched it in with his fingers and dabbed along
You can see the fingerprints all across the transition from the darker blue to the lighter
blue sky. There's something about that I think that is very very compelling because it just feels, you
know, literally like the touch of the artist is right there with us as we look at the picture
Something very satisfying to see. If you'd like to learn more about the collection you can click here
or here. Thank you for watching and we'll see you next time