Well the painting is back upstairs now after the relining, which you've seen in
previous films, and I've started doing some of the retouching of the losses
and damages and one of the first things I have done is to start to put in some
of the colour to simulate Artemisia's priming layers, her ground, around the
edges where there are larger losses or indeed in this case additions and I
think that's a good starting point to discuss questions of the format of the
picture because I think you've noticed that it is quite a square picture and
the format is an unusual quality of her works at this time and it's one of the
things we've had to think about in terms of how we put the picture back together.
- I mean, I think we knew quite early on that the picture has probably been
reduced a little along the top. It is really odd that the pearl on this sort of
pinnacle here, it's sort of cut through, but the question was, sort of, how much and
obviously, during the relining process, we look to physical evidence on the back,
on the canvas itself. I mean, also as a curator, you hope there's some sort of
visual evidence of an engraving after a picture or a drawing or some sort of
visual record and unfortunately in this case there really isn't so we really had
to go on weighing up the evidence and instinct a bit as well.
So, as we look at the canvas itself as an object, we can gather certain ideas,
certain evidence, that help us understand the format. One of the things we look for
is a sort of pattern of what we call cusping or scalloping and that's when
the canvas has got a rather squiggly pattern in the canvas weave and that's
caused by the initial distortion of stretching the canvas before any of the
under layers went on when the canvas was first being prepared for painting and
when that priming layer goes on, or layers go on, it has the effect of
locking in these kind of distortions in the canvas and when you see those kind
of squiggly lines that scalloping it's usually very good evidence that you are
at or near an original edge that was turned over. In this case, this whole
strip coming down inside we know, from evidence looking at the back during
relining, was part of an edge that went around the strainer and was subsequently
folded out during an old lining so we have good evidence of that contour
scalloping on the right side and at the bottom and we can be quite
confident about those being more or less in this case definitely the original
contours, the original edges. On the other sides, left and top, we have less of that
scalloping. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that those edges are missing quite
a lot - sometimes you can infer that - but sometimes these canvases were primed
with much larger sizes and then trimmed afterwards so the absence of scalloping
doesn't necessarily mean you're missing a bit but this is one of those
interesting things where you think about weighing up physical evidence and then
comparing it to other works and thinking about a kind of general taste and period
inclination and in compositional interest,
particularly where she's concerned in Florence.
Especially at this time because looking
at other pictures from this period in Florence they're all very tightly cropped.
They're quite square in format, not exactly square like this one is, but
she's obviously filling up the canvases right to their very edges and as you
said this is absolutely its original lower edge and look how closely that
sleeve, you know, almost abuts that edge.
I mean you and I aren't in total agreement about the left:
I feel there's a little bit more missing but we took the view,
after lots of consideration, to actually not add something there where we don't
really know for certain it was there but I think it's reasonable to assume that
at the top, you know, she wouldn't have left, you know, half a pearl
and whether there was only a centimetre,
two centimetres, an inch, we just don't know that and I think the
decision we've made is a measured one and it's something obviously that's not
irreversible and it can always be framed out. I mean, that's what
we're going to do here: the frame will, in fact, cover that and I feel also that the
tight cropping is sort of intrinsic to this moment in her art. It's not just a
compositional thing but it brings that figure right in to the foreground and
kind of makes the connection with the figure much stronger and this white
sleeve which we've talked about before, especially now that she's been cleaned,
you can see the white of her sleeve sort of jut out and you really feel the projection
of this and I think that working together with this very tight composition
it's a very, very, you know, intentional thing on behalf of the museum.
- And I think these decisions are going to become even more important and more
telling when we get around to trying out frames and framing because the tight
crop, working in the frame, really will do very interesting things, quite powerful
things, I think, to the illusionism of how the picture's fitted in this shape so
I mean we've taken the view that, although we can't know for sure if the
halo was completed, we certainly feel pretty confident that this pattern of
jewels must have been completed in this one so we've decided, in the first
instance, to reconstruct and, you'll see that as the retouching progresses,
a band across the top of about between one and a half and two centimetres which
I will reconstruct to match the surrounding paint, finishing this jewel,
taking the halo and still having a slight crop at the top of halo and
finishing the palm frond and we've decided, I think, and I certainly
believe that the idea of finishing that jewel is enough to complete the
composition satisfactorily and we can always leave it a slightly unknown, open
question as to how much more might have been there but it feels measured and
reasonable in terms of getting the picture to work properly
and in keeping with this idea of these tight crops we see in other works from this time.
you