The amazing thing is we have to remember Filippino [Lippi] may only have been about 14 or 15 when he did this,
but he was an artist's son and precociously talented. In the previous episode, we looked at
the removal of the frame and the restoration of Botticelli's and Filippino's 'Adoration of the Kings',
but while that work was taking place, the painting was also being examined by the
Scientific and Conservation departments, using several different imaging techniques.
In this episode we're going to show you how we use these imaging techniques in conjunction
with traditional connoisseurship to investigate
which elements of the painting were painted by Botticelli and which were painted by Filippino.
My name is Marta Melchiorre and I am one of the scientists at the National Gallery who contributed
to the technical investigation of this painting. I'm Jill Dunkerton, restorer in the Conservation
department, and I've been responsible for the restoration of the painting, but also for the
overall interpretation of the results of the scientific examination. The panel was painted
at an early stage in the careers of both artists. It's likely that they were both trained in the
very busy Renaissance workshop of Filippo Lippi, who was Filippino's father, but they wouldn't
have been there necessarily at the same time, as Filippino was much younger than Botticelli.
Artists in the Renaissance didn't work independently and alone. They usually had
busy workshops with assistants carrying out all sorts of tasks. They had young artists in training,
and also quite often experienced painters who would help them out on big projects, such as fresco
cycles, large altar pieces, but what's unusual about this painting is that it's quite small.
It has long been suspected that Filippino was working with Botticelli on it, and we know that he
was in Botticelli's workshop in 1472, approximately the date of this painting, and he may well have
transferred immediately to Botticelli's shop on the death of his father a few years previously.
Renaissance artists, when they were working on projects such as cassone, which were chests made
for weddings, were obviously up against deadlines, because there was the wedding,
and so they often collaborated with other artists, and we know that Botticelli collaborated with
Filippino on such cassoni, but the division of labour is extremely clear-cut, with one panel
being painted by Botticelli, another by Filippino, and so it's not that complicated to sort them out.
But this painting is extremely complicated, because it seems that both together were working on it.
As a result of the scientific examination we were able to show
that there was an extremely unusual collaboration in a set of circumstances that we still
don't quite understand, but we're going to show you some of the highlights of our discoveries.
In the first instance you can look at the surface of the picture, and this is
the basis of traditional connoisseurship, which involves the careful looking at
of paintings, but based on a very thorough knowledge of the works of the artists that
you're looking at, in this case the early works of both artists. We can use connoisseurship to work
out which painter was responsible for which parts of the painting, up to a point, anyway.
At the National Gallery, the process of dividing the hands through connoisseurship is helped by
the fact that in our extraordinary Collection, we have two paintings of the same subject, the
adoration of the kings, one entirely by Botticelli the Tondo painted shortly after the painting that
we're talking about now, but also one by the very young Filippino, and so we can look at those to get
to know our artists. There are certain general characteristics that you can immediately use
to start to divide up the figures. Botticelli throughout his life was a great storyteller,
and his figures in the painting are very animated and expressive. They're also highly individualised.
In these early works he tends to dress his figures in very complicated multi-coloured costumes.
In Filippino's style they're somehow cooler and calmer, very very beautiful,
but more static, and often the draperies are full length and all of the same colour.
This difference in character between the figures is very apparent at the junction between
a group that we believe to be by Filippino and a group by Botticelli, where we actually have
a Filippino figure dressed in turquoise and white talking to a Botticelli figure.
When we go in a little bit closer, this is still something you can see from looking at the surface
of the painting. It's evident that the artists differed in how they modelled the faces of their
figures. They'd had exactly the same training in the Florentine tradition of temporary painting,
and so the first stage was putting in an underpaint of a light green earth.
This was a tradition in Florentine painting, and had been for centuries. However, we can also
observe the painting surface more closely with a microscope. Photographs can be taken,
and in fact more than 200 such microphotographs were taken by our colleague Rachel Billinge
in the course of the investigation, and here we're just going to show you two.
When we look closely we can see that Botticelli used so much lead white in his modelling of the
flesh that the green earth is almost completely covered. You would barely know it was there,
and then he worked up the details with touches of red paint, and also lots of finely hatched shading,
and then the features, the eyes, the nose and so on, are picked out in mixtures often using
quite a bit of black. They're very strongly defined because his figures are so strongly characterised.
Filippino, on the other hand, applied his flesh tones more thinly and didn't use nearly so much lead
white, and so as a result we see the green earth, and he's using it as part of the modelling system
of his flesh tones, also when he does details such as eyes and nose and mouth, he tends to model them
using brown mixtures, often just containing earth pigments, there isn't the black that you see in
Botticelli. Our observations, based on traditional connoisseurship, that is very careful looking,
are supported by technical examination, and this also supplied fascinating clues as to what may
have happened in the course of painting the picture, and how the artists actually collaborated.
One method that we used for our scientific investigation
was macro x-ray fluorescence scanning. This is a spectral imaging technique used to map the
distribution of chemical elements in the paint, both at and below the surface of the painting,
and since different pigments contain specific elements such as red copper, mercury, iron and so
on, we can use this technique to investigate the composition and structure of the paint passages
in a completely non-invasive way. This provides insights into an artist painting technique,
but can also reveal changes that were made during the course of painting.
This is the XRF map for iron, and it therefore shows the distribution of pigments
containing this element, and it clearly highlights the difference in how the two artists modelled
their figures. So if we look closely at this group of figures, we see that those painted
by Filippino appear fairly bright, showing the iron from the yellow and red hair pigments,
including the uppermost paint passages, but also from the green earth used in the very first
underpaint, and this results in a very distinctive appearance of the eye sockets, what we started to
call, together with our colleague Catherine Higgitt who first noticed this, Filippino's 'panda eyes'.
The eyes by Botticelli instead look more like black and white photo negatives, I would say,
and this is because the lead white containing paint that he used to solidly model these
figures covers completely the green earth from the underpaint, so what we see in the iron XRF map
is only the contribution from the earth pigment in the uppermost paint passages. The scientific
investigation didn't just support the attribution of the figures, but it also revealed a very complex
story about the collaboration, and we can just show you some of the highlights. Infrared imaging
techniques proved particularly useful in those areas where the pigments and the buildup of paint
allowed the infrared light to penetrate to show the preliminary underdrawing on the white gesso
of the panel. This shows because the underdrawing has been done with a black drawing material.
When we looked at the infrared of the painting as a whole,
it became evident that almost all the under drawing that we could see was by Botticelli, and we
use connoisseurship when we're looking at underdrawings as well, we have to compare them
with other underdrawings, known underdrawings, by the artist,
and the style that we could see in most figures was very typical of early works by Botticelli,
and we believe that he started the painting, and actually did all the underdrawing on his own.
He even began to paint before Filippino became involved. In the previous video,
we showed that parts of the landscape, and in particular the distant landscape with the little
town and the rocks, were actually quoted from a painting or a composition designed by Jan van Eyck.
We believe, and most art historians believe, that the artist who's most likely to have copied a
landscape from Van Eyck is Filippino. Botticelli was never very interested in landscape, and when he
paints them himself, they're usually quite simple and quite generalised. But Filippino was fascinated
by early Netherlandish painting and continued to quote from early Netherlandish paintings
throughout his career. Infrared examination shows that underneath this introduced Eyck-ean landscape,
which we believe to be Filippino's, there is actually a completely different idea for
a landscape, which looks entirely as though it was by Botticelli. We can see that where we now
have bushes, a tree, and some sort of bulgy rocks, there were horsemen and figures
rushing to attend the adoration of the kings, the tail end of the procession. The animated and
excited way that they behave, and also the drawing style is entirely characteristic of Botticelli, but
unfortunately, with ordinary infrared the dark green malachite pigment of the bush
obscures the procession, and we can only see the hooves of the horses. More horses and riders emerge
under the bushes on the left side in this other image that was produced applying advanced
processing methods to the data collected with our cutting edge reflectance imaging spectroscopy
system, that works deeper in the infrared compared to traditional infrared reflectography.
When we return to looking at the rocks in the painting, more traditional infrared reflectography
shows us an underdrawing style which is very different from that of Botticelli.
It's very confident, but the lines are shorter and more discontinuous.
The amazing thing is we have to remember Filippino may only have been about 14 or 15
when he did this, but he was an artist's son and precociously talented.
A very similar style of underdrawing appears in the figures that we have identified as having
been painted by Filippino. But that might make sense, but how can that be if we're going to
argue that the painting was begun by Botticelli, who would therefore have done all the underdrawing
of the painting before he began to paint the picture, and Filippino got involved?
Well the figures painted by Filippino have a very characteristic appearance in the various
infrared images, including and I would say in particular in this narrow band false colour
reflectance image, where they look much brighter than the figures painted by Botticelli instead.
And we found that these relate to the fact that Filippino painted these figures in an area
where some earlier paint had been scraped away. A 3D scan taken by my colleague Rachel Billinge
of the surface actually gives a clearer picture of those areas where the paint has been scraped away.
You can actually see the edge of the scraping, and even one place where whoever scraped it off
actually gouged into the gesso of the ground. In a way it's amazing that we've never seen this before.
Equally remarkable is the second king who's kneeling down, doffing his crown in front of
the child. The draperies in the figure look as though they're painted by Botticelli and
there are lots of changes in them, but the style is Botticellis, the colours and so on,
but the head is very clearly by Filippino, and we could see that with the XRF mapping.
And so it would seem that we have another area which was scraped away, which is confirmed by the
3D scan. I suspect that this king, since he's the middle of the three, must be Melchiore, Marta's king.
You might think from this evidence that Botticelli painted the picture, and then Filippino came along
later and added bits of landscape and scraped off bits and changed it, but in fact the technical
evidence doesn't support this argument at all, nor does traditional connoisseurship, because it's quite
clear that Botticelli came in and then finished off the picture, adding the dark green paint
that fills in the grass of the foreground. But while he was doing it,
he made lots of the sorts of decisions that the senior artists would be making. It's also
done quite broadly and confidently. I think Filippino would have been a little bit more
careful and fussy. Botticelli never spends too much time on unimportant parts of paintings,
and this is supported when we look at the XRF maps of the lower part of the picture. Where indeed we
see that there is a change in the height of one of the figures added by Filippino in the scraped
area, but also that by applying the green paint Botticelli covered the oldest king's gift.
I have a feeling that might have been a mistake, or that they actually forgot to put another one
back, because one of the other kings, Melchior, does have his gift, and that's a lovely gold bar.
There's just the sense that they had to get this picture finished.
We learned quite a lot about the collaboration of the two artists throughout the collaboration
of our departments at the National Gallery, but what are the open questions that we are left with?
Well, the question that science and that we can't answer at the moment
is why did this happen? Why were the figures scraped off? It's just possible that there were
portraits of Florentine notables included, and there are some heads that survive in Botticelli
heads that do look as though they could be portraits, and maybe those people became non-grata to the
organisation or to the private patron who commissioned the picture.
But we don't know who the patron was, we don't know where it originally was displayed, and so
it's really over to the art historians. We need somebody to make a lucky find
in an archive in Florence and identify who the patron was, and where the painting was displayed.
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or here. Thank you very much for watching and we hope to see you next time.