Well, you're seeing the painting now after I've started doing the retouching
and that is the visual elimination of the losses and damages through new paint
applied by me to cover those up and I think it's important to say a little bit
about the kind of general principles behind retouching that we do on old
master paintings at the National Gallery.
There are a few guidelines that are kind
of absolutely consistent with this kind of picture and that is first of all, all
the paint that I apply, all the retouching paint I apply, is applied on
top of the varnish that I apply after cleaning and relining so there's a
layer between my retouching and the paint that is, itself, a removable layer.
The materials we use for our retouching are modern synthetic resins for the most
part which are, themselves, quite stable and quite reversible so it's important
to understand that all the retouching we do is quite reversible and not intended
to be a sort of permanent and unremovable interpretation of the work
of art so that's one thing that's really key.
I'm always asked and people always
want to know if you using exactly the same materials and the same paints as the
artist, as Artemisia did in this case and the answer is well no, not really, because
we're interested in using materials, both the paint medium and the pigments, that
are as absolutely stable as we think they can possibly be.
Part of that stability, of course, is enhanced by the way we control the environment in terms
of the amount of light and the elimination of ultraviolet and other
things that accelerate change but the materials we use anyway, inherently, are
quite, quite stable.
So one thing we always try to do, however, in trying to
get an effective retouching is to copy old master painting technique in terms
of the layer structure and I think that's kind of the key to understanding
how these paintings work because you're looking through many layers of paint,
some are more transparent, some are more opaque, there are things underneath that
influence the layers on top and you really need to understand that,
that buildup from the bottom to the top, to do an effective retouching because our
intention, on a picture like this, with this kind of pattern of wear and loss is
to make retouchings that are. in the Gallery, impossible to see because we
want you to see the artist's achievement,
her skill, her facility or intention, all these things and we want that to be as
easily understood as possible by making sure that things like these damages go
away effectively.
Now, they are all documented: we have photographs of
everything. You can also look with things like ultraviolet light, you can see
exactly the true state of the picture in terms of its preservation but when it's in
the Gallery we want you to understand this as a work of art.
It's not as it was but it's as close as it can be,
we think, in terms of getting the relationships
working and letting you get closer to what she was intending to convey.
So, with that sort of thing in mind, you can already see some of the buildup in
various stages where I've been working.
We talked a little bit earlier about format
and how we'd added a bit of canvas across the top and here you can
see already that I've put in something quite close to her priming layer,
her ground, which is this kind of pale brown, slightly warm colour and that's something
that's underneath the whole picture and indeed you can see it left relatively
exposed in parts of the background and then, if you start thinking about that,
you can see it's showing through in various parts and it's clearly what's
happening here in the background and so when you look at an area like this
you're seeing this colour modified by a warm transparent dark brown glaze that
you see through partially and it's that sort of thing we absolutely tried to do
with the retouchings that we do so that, similarly, we have this colour
underneath the flesh paint of the arm and these are areas of total loss and
that dark colour, relatively dark, it looks much darker than this but that's simply
an optical effect about what's next to it, but that darker colour means that
when I apply the lighter paint on top it immediately has a kind of opacity, that
she intended too, that's absolutely essential to the modeling of the form.
Likewise, you see a lighter under-layer here in the sleeve that's been modified
by a translucent red lake glaze and you can see that it's gotten a bit worn from
old cleanings and relinings in the past and the tops of the canvas threads
or the weave are missing a little bit of the colour so I'll be doing a little bit
of dotting there to bring that back together and I've already done quite a
bit of that tiny dotting of little losses in the face and the neck and the
hair and that's one of the things I think is most satisfying about this kind
of retouching because it's actually a very small precise application of paint
and what that does; it feels sometimes kind of miraculous because it unlocks
all this amazing modeling and transition and control of paint and
layers that's all there. It's just a bit kind of lost in the kind of noise and
the static of lots of little losses and, as you reduce those, you start to really
see the form: you see the modeling, the transitions,
the way the eye socket emerges from the shadow, the cheekbone.
These things are, you know, so effective.
Again, there was some abrasion and wearing there and
doing a little bit of that top layer of brown on the tops of the canvas threads
suddenly mean you understand the plane of the wheel and again the glint of the
metal edge of the sharp cutting edge of that Catherine wheel.
It is leaping out now; you understand the space
in a very, much more, compelling way I think
and it's all there. It's inside the picture and just by doing a very
small amount of retouching you help make that much more obvious to the viewer.
And now the retouching is finished. We've made the losses go away along the lines
that we discussed earlier; building up the layers from the ground color which
you can see here on the right edge, through the body colour and glazes and so
the actual holes and damages have been compensated for and I think also, maybe
more subtly, we've been working on reducing the effect of the small wearing
and abrasion that you could see before any retouching in some of the
transitions of the flesh or indeed in the background.
The other thing that we've been thinking about
is reducing, but not eliminating, some of the effects
that have occurred in the background due to the paint simply becoming more
transparent as its aged over the centuries.
So some of the effects of brush work and underlay,
as you can see showing through from behind, were
showing more than would have been the case when the picture was made and so
we've reduced some of the effects only to the point where we think it became
too apparent in her intended reading of the composition.
In addition to compensating for losses and damage,
as we talked about earlier, we have taken that decision
to extend the top of the picture by between one and three
centimetres and so now you see it with that extension retouched fully which
means creating the tip of the palm frond, adding the one pearl and small elements
of the halo which still is cropped but now, I think, works very effectively with the
ring of jewels completed.
These are the kinds of retouching decisions that we
take as a group, in discussion with Letizia and my other colleagues and we
kind of work slowly and talk and see how we think it works.
This strip down the right,
as we mentioned earlier in talking about the cropping, is the
original tacking edge that was unfolded at the time of the picture's lining
at least 100 years ago so we've kept that, that will be covered out, covered by the
new frame.
It's painted, in fact, in the simulation of the ground colour which is
underneath the whole painting and I would also simply like to stress that
all the retouching we've done is on top of our varnish. It is in materials that
are reversible, it's documented in all the photographs
that we take so you can see exactly where the damages are and indeed you can
easily see it with an ultraviolet light which I can show you, for example, here in
the arm: the losses you've seen earlier, the retouchings show is very dark under
ultraviolet light and things like the damages along the seam and indeed all
the retouching that we've done is very easily identifiable with this torch and
with the documentation that we've done before.
And so now she's ready for her
new frame and we're very excited to see how it's going to look.