To me, I can't really see what they look like, I really have a very indistinct
idea, I'm really relying on Amanda to get it right in the end. To make them look
like I wanted them to look.
Maybe when they're all done, we'll be able to say something a bit more positive.
When, they're all done, and they work, they'll
just look right, and there will be nothing much to say. They'll just look
like real frames. But it's a real, it's a real mystery, how well it can
work and how it works.
Welcome! This is the National Gallery's
Framing department, I'm Peter Schade, the Head of Framing. This is the store of the
Framing department, with lots of frames that we keep. We are at the moment
we're making enormous frames for the Titian Exhibition. Come along, I'll show you.
This is the machine shop of the framing workshop, and we are making frames for
the Titian series, really large Italian 16th-century frames, replica frames, out
of Italian poplar, Lombardy poplar, which is actually quite difficult to buy, so we
buy a whole tree, which then gets cut for us to the right thicknesses. It comes in
these enormous boards, which we'll then cut to the right size.
Planing by hand
makes it possible to kind of shape it as you go along, rather than making it by
machine, where you just have one continuous exactly the same profile all
the way along. The shape of the way the board is aged, we keep all that sort of
irregularity all the way down into the mouldings, which will make it look more
real in the end.
Once the mouldings have been run into a pattern, then we start
tracing the path of carving for carving. Well I mean the whole carving
for the frame takes about three weeks. There are six frame so it's
it's been a few months. But this is the last frame we're doing, we are just literally
starting on the last frame.
I'm actually going to use screws, that's the only really 21st century
cheating, because we've got very good screws now, and they work really well, and
it's the strongest way of securing them. They - the Italians in the 16th century
would have used a whole bucket full of nails to assemble this kind of frame.
So I'm just trying to position it so that it's even all the way around, which
takes a bit of time to - starting off sort of randomly - oh that's perfect, that's
ridiculous, that's perfect. This is the last side of the last frame
to be glued on, then the entire assembly is finished.
All the woodwork is finished. That's it. That's the last side of all these.
I think I think I calculated it's nearly 50 meters of carved moulding that you [Francois] did.
I'm putting on layers of rabbit skin glue, with Italian gesso, so it's
gesso de Bologne. Once I've got this first coat on it, it gets easier,
once I've got into the depths, and you build it up so it's a nice soft
surface. And then you put the clay on afterwards, and the gold, so you can get a
really nice high shine with the gold when you burnish. I'm putting on the clay
or the bowl, which is sort of a red and a black ,a red blacky colour, and I'm putting
it on very carefully, on top of the yellow clay. The yellow clay which
you put on first, and you go into the depths, so that when you're gilding
you can disguise the areas you miss slightly in the in the bottoms, and then
I'm very carefully putting the darker color on the just on the tops. This is
the application of the gold, we are using 23 and a half karat gold, a fairly pure
gold. It's actually so thin that you can you can see light through it, and that's
why the the colour of the of the bowl is really important, because that influences
the kind of hue of the gold, it can make it dark or warmer or cooler. If you touch
the gold leaf, it just sticks to your fingers, it just disappears immediately,
it goes to nothing. So it's a very elusive
substance, and this looks very easy, the way Cesare does it, but it takes
years to do it with as much confidence. I hate it, for me it always flies around
and you forever chase little bits of gold leaf flying around the air.
That's a whole leaf of gold put on in one go. That looks super easy and it's
almost impossible to do. All the burnishing is done with an agate stone
these days. Originally, there were animal teeth were also used for burnishing. You
can you can apply pressure onto the gilded surface, and it makes the gold
look like molten gold, really solid and shiny. Through the burnishing it becomes
very hard wearing. Before it's burnished it's quite easily - it's quite
easily abraded, but after burnishing it's really solid. This
is the final stage of the making of the frames, where the surface is made
to look like like an original 16th-century surface. So we've got this frame
here, which is by chance, we have a frame that is being restored, and part of
it has an example of fantastic original gilding. And it doesn't have to match this
exactly, but it gives an indication of what a real frame of the time would look
like. It's really crucial that this part is right, because that is what is right
next to this painted surface, even when you don't look at the frame, since that's
what your field of vision will be influenced by.
The trouble is if these
frames are too bright and garish, you're not going to see the painting, and it's
all about the painting.
The life of the paintings, these are paintings about transformation, they're
paintings about the mutability of natural form, of bodies changing shape,
and they have this energy, they have this energy of transformation, in the very
execution, in the very way they're painted, the way Titian lets the colours
blend into each other, and keeps contours open and so on. And all of that is
complemented by the frames that have this pulse running through them, because
of this pattern, that suggests the flow of water or of an undulating organic form.
We went to great lengths not just to make the same or similar frames, but
to make similar frames that can be followed back to Titian, to designs
that Titian would have been familiar with. And fully carved frames, which is I think
a first for any exhibition of this scale, to make that many fully carved frames.
It's an extraordinary effort, just in terms of materials and
the amount of gold used, and the hours spent carving
these frames, that's a really monumental effort. And I think
probably the National Gallery in London is one of the few places in the world
where this kind of thing could have actually been made.