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Some restorers might dot around
different colours. They might do
all the red lake bits. But I just love building back
a picture, particularly a very damaged
one like this.
Seeing it sort of come back to some sort of unity.
It's never going to be total, because
it's got a long history but it is,
even now for me, very very
pleasing to be able to see how a picture can
come together, to some extent,
particularly one with a history like this one.
Hello, I'm Jill Dunkerton, and I'm a Restorer
in the Conservation Department
here at the National Gallery. Since we
last saw this painting at the end of the
removal of the frame, a great deal has
happened. I've been working for several months
on the retouching of the damage to the painting.
This has been quite a story, because
initially when we began work on the
painting, when the frame was still on,
we knew that there had been a lot of damage,
caused tragically by a severe over
cleaning in the 19th century.
But there didn't seem to be enough information
to do anything other than a very general compromise
restoration, of parts of the architecture,
and of the rocks. You can't just make things
up. But when we took the
frame off, we discovered that all along the top,
where it had been protected by the frame, we had
almost undamaged original paint.
This was very exciting, full of
information, but it created a huge problem initially,
because I couldn't think how I was ever
going to be able to tie together
visually, so that it wasn't disturbing,
the well-preserved paint and the very damaged paint.
Until, I suddenly realised something.
It's long been known that this part of the landscape,
the rocks, and the little town of course,
we now see more of it as a result of the
removal of the frame,
was a direct quotation from a
composition by Jan van Eyck,
showing the stigmatisation of Saint Francis.
This painting was obviously immensely successful. Two
versions have survived to this day, and
there must have been one of these
versions in Florence,
and it created a sensation among Florentine painters,
and so it was quoted here. But I suddenly
realised I'd been looking at these rocks up here.
I've seen these somewhere before! And
then I suddenly realised
that they were actually also taken from
the Jan van Eyck. This meant that it was possible
for me to, in the restoration,
reconstruct, at least to a certain level,
the rocks, copying Jan van Eyck,
just as Botticelli and Filippino Lippi had done,
back into the painting. It was quite a
challenge, because Jan van Eyck is a very different technique
and style, and I had to copy Jan van Eyck
back into the painting in the manner of Filippino Lippi,
but all the while using our modern restoration materials,
which are not tempera paints, but
soft resin varnishes. What I don't want to lose
is this beautiful freedom of the
handling of the tempura paint,
the little brushstrokes are all still
visible. You mustn't overdo it,
or then you get something that looks
sort of dead, really. You must keep the
life in the painting. And it's old,
it's always going to look
slightly damaged. I'd rather that.
Paintings in wonderful condition of this
period of rare,
and this one has had a very tough life
so far. Everything we do now
in modern conservation is using
materials which are reversible, so these
soft resin paints are easily dissolved.
The same solvent that I'm using to
soften the paint to put it on,
can then be used to remove it in the future.
And i'm sure that will happen one day,
but I hope not too soon.
We don't use exactly the same pigments
as the artists, because they,
some of them are not stable, some of the
pigments they used are very toxic
and so we're no longer allowed to.
Another fascinating thing about the figures
is, and this is so typical of Botticelli,
is how strongly characterised they all are.
You would think if you were having to do
this number of people you would
tend to give them all the same sort of
features but they've
all got different expressions, they're
all doing different things.
I'm particularly fond of these figures up here,
who are just bystanders, because a fight
has broken out here,
rather nasty, with an axe, and a sword,
and they're just looking, you know, 'oh what's happening?'
And that's just done with a few flicks of the brush.
Botticelli can tell a story, animate his figures,
even at this early stage of his
career, with astonishing
fluency and confidence, and humour, I think
there's humour in this as well.
Another fascinating consequence of the
removal of the frame
is that we now understand better
how the painting was organised in
three levels. Before, when the frame was there,
you can see that it looked as though
this was a continuous space,
and that these figures were much smaller
than these ones,
and so you think, well, it's just sort of
naive incompetency, these are young artists,
but in fact, that's not how it's meant to
be at all,
because recovering these blocks here
shows that all these people are at a
lower level to this group here.
And so to come up into this part of the painting,
they have to come up some hidden steps,
through the doorway,
so you have one level here, one level here,
and then you go up slightly again to the
group with the Virgin and Child
and Saint Joseph. It's been
incredibly rewarding working my way
slowly across the figures,
because they are so beautifully painted,
and I now know that this is really going to work
when these figures are finally retouched.
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