The restoration of Piero della Francesca's 'Nativity' is now complete. It's been through a
long and complex treatment involving cleaning, panel work and also now a very, very long and
complicated restoration of the damage through splits, through plate losses and a very dramatic
part of the panel treatment was the need to insert a thin sliver of wood down this join because when
it was rejoined in the mid-19th century, probably when the painting came to England, they actually
planed down the edges of the boards and we lost a bit of paint and so there was nowhere to restore
the damage. We have put in this tiny fillet of wood, which was a very complex operation, but that has
allowed me to retouch through the join. There's now room for the eye of the angel, the rose of the loot
is perfect and, of course, Piero's perspective is critical and then on down through the fold
of the drapery and the child's hands. The aim of this restoration was to try and make a more
coherent painting than we'd had before. What the aim was, was enough for people not to just look
and think "what's happened to their shepherds? Why do they look so different?" but also to stop them from
jumping forward, which they did before, because you were seeing the light colored gesso and the aim
of retouching the shepherds was to make them go back into space so that we had this coherent
space that Piero had planned. The number of things we've seen in this picture that nobody had ever
seen before is quite alarming actually. You realise such a famous picture, you can go on and on looking
at it and these things emerge. What these light patches are is where a shaft of light is bursting
through the hole in the stable roof. Now even that hole in the roof wasn't very clear before,
especially when it had a dirty varnish, so it's streaming through and catching the stones. This
is a real typical Piero idea. He's fascinated by light. This light is significant because it
actually means something. It must relate to the idea of God's light coming from outside, falling on
the roof and then that, of course, immediately makes sense of the gesture of the shepherd, if he is a
shepherd and I think he probably is, who's pointing up to the hole in the roof and drawing our
attention to it. The re-presentation of this picture. with this very different way of restoring it.
is radical but it is reversible. Everything we use can be dissolved off with very, very
mild solvents. This has always been a much loved painting but I think most of us when looking at it
would have thought "Oh but what a shame. What a pity that this whole area was so damaged." We've
learned to live with it and accommodate it but what I hope now is people will understand much
better the painting as a whole because it is actually the most beautifully and cleverly
designed picture. It's wonderfully well balanced. We have an exciting plan to relaunch the painting for
Christmas. It's not going to go into a big gallery with lots of other pictures. It's going to go in a
rather small room all by itself with no other paintings because we want to encourage people to contemplate
the picture and also perhaps catch some of the mood of the painting. It's a really quiet,
contemplative picture. It's almost a meditation and it would be lovely to think that people could just
sit or stand quietly in front of the picture and let It capture them because it does do that.