Hello, I'm heading up to the Conservation Studio today
to talk to Kristina Mandy about one of her ongoing conservation projects. This is the way.
It's a little bit noisy!
[Laura] Hi Kristina! [Kristina] Hi Laura! How are you? Come on in.
I'll just lift the painting a bit. [Laura] Great. So, many of you will remember Kristina from the previous
video that she did, maybe halfway through the treatment of this painting. Kristina Mandy,
she's the conservator, assistant conservator of paintings here at the Gallery. [Kristina] Sorry - no you're
fine, my title's just changed. It's just conservator.
[Laura] Yay, she's been promoted! Can I say that on video?
[Laura] So how did you feel when you were told that you would be working on this project?
[Kristina] I think it was a mix between really excited and also a bit daunted, because it is such an important
painting, we have so few examples of paintings from this period, especially in good, relatively good
condition. [Laura] In this country. [Kristina] Exactly and so I really saw it as a challenge to learn a lot more about
this style of painting, but also the materials and how they behave as well. Maybe you might remember
from the last video that the decision was made to remove the re-gilding from the 19th century
on the frame and that was re-gilding that had been done in a very unsympathetic way. It was really
solid and looked like sticking a modern frame onto a really beautiful old painting, so we we
had this external frame and gilding specialist come in and work on the frame and with his
expertise he was able to restore the frame in such a way that it's now much more sympathetic,
much more in keeping with the rest of the painting. [Laura] One of the things
that - one of the effects I think that has now been achieved is that the frame is no longer the first
thing you see. It's not this kind of slightly glaring eyesore. You really keep your focus on
the part of the painting that should be focused on. It's a painting that actually has the accolade of
being the oldest painting in our Collection. It is signed by the artist Margarito d'Arezzo
We should probably take a step back and just think briefly about
the actual imagery and what we're looking at. What we have here is the Virgin enthroned. She's
enclosed with this wonderful mandala and she has the Christ child on her lap, and she's surrounded
by eight scenes. Each one relates to the an episode from the life of a different saint
Only this one actually relates to her life. It's the nativity. Then on either side of her in
the upper section we have episodes from the life of Saint John the Evangelist. Here is one of
my favorites, the episode of Saint Benedict in the wilderness, who becomes tempted by visions of a
woman that he's attracted to and in order to kind of punish himself and banish these thoughts, he
rolls around in a thorn bush. He kind of delivers this sort of corporal punishment on himself
Down here we have the episode of the beheading of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. You can see this
kind of gruesome detail where her head has left her body. On either side of the Virgin at the
lower register are two episodes from the legend of Saint Nicholas and finally this wonderful
scene with the enormous dragon, an episode from the life of Saint Margaret where she is eaten by a dragon,
but miraculously escapes unscathed. [Kristina] So she's appearing twice, is she, in the same picture? [Laura] Yeah
This kind of image of this very frontal Virgin who really faces the viewer front on is something
that we typically associate with the imagery of Byzantium, but in Madonnas from Byzantium
we never see her wearing a crown like this, and the crown itself is really kind of fantastical
It's kind of hybrid. The kind of v-shape is associated with very early kind of German crowns
whereas the hanging pearls or jewels are more typically associated with the Byzantine Empire
[Kristina] I'm just going to lift the painting up a bit so we can have a look at another area
So one of the other areas where we've done an intervention on this painting that's actually the
main part of the painting, is this area here under the Virgin's feet, that bottom edge was completely
unoriginal and we also discovered, it's sort of a bit hidden, but there's actually this marble dias
that the virgin is sat on and one of the things I really enjoy now is you can really appreciate,
you know, the lovely folds of her drapery and also her feet which have this really iconographical
importance, don't they? [Laura] Yeah absolutely. The decision by artists at this date and in later centuries
to really make the Virgin's foot very prominent is associated with this uh kind of devotional ritual
of kissing a Virgin's foot which is actually something that comes out of the secular world to
do with kissing the feet of emperors and kings, but has that is kind of transported
in a devotional sense into a kind of sacred realm. [Kristina] So one of the wonderful things about
working on a painting for so long is that you make these discoveries throughout the process
of working on it, especially when you're working with curators and scientists as well. Another
area where we made this interesting discovery is this narrative scene with Saint Nicholas.
As you might remember in the infrared image of the painting, you could see these wonderful
sea creatures. [Laura] Yeah, so evocative, all different shapes and sizes, some of them are
even eating each other and it's just an amazing level of detail that's now completely hidden.
[Kristina] One of the reasons we thought that might be less visible is because of the use of this
more opaque blue pigment azurite but through some of the analysis, the FORS (fiber optic reflectance spectroscopy) analysis that
the scientists did, we were able to figure out that it's actually indigo pigment and indigo is a much
more transparent or translucent blue pigment. The implication is actually that those creatures
would have been more visible at one point and it's just down to how the materials have degraded
and also the restoration that's happened to the painting that they're now unfortunately
less visible. [Laura] All of that speaks to the kind of sophistication of this painter which
we potentially underestimated because you know he's very carefully chosen this pigment which he
knows is more translucent and then he knows it's going to have the effect of a kind of an aqueous
seascape. [Kristina] Yes, I think this is a kind of theme that we've come back to time and time
again about how much more sophisticated Margarito is than we gave him credit for
and that's just through all these opportunities to really examine him, you know, really really close
up using all sorts of different technologies. [Laura] When this painting was first acquired it was described
as unsightly and even rude, rude in the sense of being very unsophisticated, and
was really introduced into the Collection because it was considered to be a specimen of what Western
painting looked like before it got good or before it developed and became sophisticated
and actually I think maybe that's our big takeaway, that this is an extremely sophisticated painting
which just keeps on giving. [Kristina] Absolutely. I think in a way somehow that origin of the painting
in the Collection and how it came here sort of meant it was for a time overlooked a bit,
but through this treatment of the frame and the border and small little aspects of the painting,
it's given us wonderful insight into, as you say, how sophisticated and complicated it actually is,
and we appreciate it so much more now. One of the wonderful things through this treatment
is that we've made so many fantastic discoveries about Margarito and his technique,
and helped, as you've mentioned, so much by the Scientific department,
which is where we are going to go next. So thank you so much Kristina. [Kristina] Thank you Laura! [Laura] This way
So as the sign on the door behind me indicates, we're now heading into
the Scientific department. We're going to talk to David Peggie and Helen Howard,
Senior Scientists in the department, about their work on the Margarito
Hi Helen, Hi David! [Helen] Hi Laura, nice to see you, would you have to come and have a look at
the images? [Laura] Yes please [David] We've got some of the images on the screen here that we want you to see
[Laura] Great. So of course, we've just come from a conservation studio and we're seeing the
panel in its finished state, but David and Helen have been working throughout the course of the
treatment on investigating the panel using various imaging techniques. Perhaps you can tell us a
little bit more. [Helen] So one of the methods that we've been using to look at the painting is scanning XRF
This method will produce a set of maps, and the maps each are of a particular chemical
element, for example copper or lead and these maps can then be associated with the types
of pigments used in the course of the paintings This scanning produced lots of information and
lots of the details that we weren't previously able to see. You can see here, really clearly, this
design in a copper-based pigment along the bottom, which previously we hadn't been able to see at all
[Laura] Which looks like it's trying to imitate marble kind of like a veining perhaps. [Helen] Exactly
[David] The overpaint that was on there and the dirt really obscured it and it seems strange now that
we didn't see it or it wasn't so obvious before cleaning, but I still
think that this pattern is quite a difficult thing to see without the map. You
can see it on the surface when you really look closely, once, you know, one of those things and
once you know it's there, you start to pick up and that's what this technique's really good at,
it's isolating particular chemical elements so associated with particular pigments
and then you really get a sense of, okay, well, what was the artist doing in that particular area?
In fact we've got some other images we'd like to show you as well. One of the nice things about
this one are these little leaf patterns that you see on the top and the border that separates
these scenes. [Helen] Yeah so here, these. [David] And they've almost disappeared, rather like the dias,
they had almost disappeared on the visible image, so it's not until you see a map like this and
it starts to highlight these areas that you start to go, oh right, wait a minute, you know,
what's this? How's margarito painted painted this border? It turns out that the more
you look at this border the more complex the pattern, I think it's fair to say, it becomes
[David] So the iron map is quite nice, but my favourite map we move to the the copper map from
the same scene and it's just visually stunning, you get a real sense, not of the
leaves at the end of the border pattern now, but the the actual pattern itself. It really
highlights that. [Laura] The kind of structural trellis. [David] Exactly yeah. But something that's not visible's
in the dragon, and these - can you see these scales? Or, we think they're scales, they could be sort of
some sort of modelling, but the paint on the surface has darkened so much now that they're not
visible at all. We've tried, even though we now know these are there, we've looked so
hard and we just can't see them, and there could be a number of reasons for that but
now we can sort of get a sense of how Margarito painted this dragon and
the fact that the dragon would have been quite a bit, you know, now it's quite a flat
unmodeled sort of simple dragon, but it probably would have been quite complex
And then the wonderful outline of Saint Margaret, they are being both eaten and excreted
in a copper-based pigment, so we're really getting a sense of all the different pigments
Some that are visible when you look carefully
and others that really aren't. We can this technique allows us in a kind
of particularly sort of garish way, perhaps, but to false color
and we can start to build up these elemental maps in whatever colour we choose,
to see where the the different pigments have been used, and here was just a nice
example of the coppers in green, leads in orange and irons in a sort of purpley color
and starting to build up, and you can see when you overlay the elements in this
way, how the structure of the dragon, you can see these little the copper based
scales or modeling have been used. [Laura] I think the big takeaway is just how intricate what Margarito's
approach is. The more we discover the more we see how highly skilled and how highly thought
through every individual element of the work was. David and Helen's work will go on but the work on
the frame is finished and the painting will be going back on the wall very soon and hopefully
that means you the visitors to the gallery will have the opportunity to come and see for yourself.
[Kasper] How long has this been off for? [Laura] A couple of years. [Kasper] Just flies by, doesn't
it? [Laura] Yeah I know, well it was kind of before COVID, I think that was very delayed
[Kasper] Okay so, I think to start off we'll just lift it up to the same centre height as these
ones either side because it's tall, because it's a bit taller it might want to go a little
bit higher, but we'll start there and then just see how you feel. [Laura] Great, yep, thank you
Okay so today after a long period in the conservation studio we are hanging the
picture back in the Galleries. Here you can see the guys have established the height for the picture
and now they're going to put in the brackets to hang the picture on the wall
I've never noticed how completely not straight the bottom of this frame is. [Kasper] Oh yeah, how is it -?
[Laura] I mean the illusion is that it's riding up at the right but i think it's level because the
verticals look good. [Kasper] Okay what do you think, should I put the spirit level and just see?
[Laura] Yeah let's have a look. So the job of a curator in these hangs is to ensure that the pictures are
shown to their very best advantage, that they're well lit, straight on the wall and also that they
exist in kind of harmonious conversation with the other works of art in the room.
[Kasper] I think it'll look quite good together as well with that spacing like it's tight but it's nice