Michael Gallagher: When I first came to the Museum and I walked around the collections,
there were just certain objects that struck me as being great things but looking tired.
The Giovanni di Paolo panels, they just looked
forgotten. They hadn't been treated since they
came into the collection. The varnish was very discolored; the varnish went across the
gilded surfaces, so they looked like the figures were set in dark amber, and I felt that they
were an invitation to walk on by. They entered the collection in 1932 and they
haven't been treated it since that date. So going from left to right, you have Saint Monica,
then Saint Augustine, the Virgin and Child, John the Baptist, and then Saint Nicholas
of Tolentino. When you just see individual panels you forget
that often they were part of very monumental altarpieces and these altarpieces
were dismantled, they were taken out of chapels, so it's not unusual for them to have
been broken up. So, to have five main panels and also for them to have retained their original
framing features, for the actual wood panels not to have been thinned, is amazing, actually.
You then really take in what's ahead of you
in terms of the challenges of treatment. You do
see the extent of damages and crude retouching, a lot overpainting on the gilding that was
going to be very challenging. Thinking of how old they are, they were painted
in 1454, the paint layer is in extraordinary condition. The paint doesn't always adhere
brilliantly to the gold, so frequently the damages are just where that overlap is. There
is also a little wear in some of the flesh tones.
They were prepared with this greenish underlayer, which was typical of the period, and in
areas that got rubbed through that became dominant and needed to be just balanced a bit
in retouching. But in the scheme of things,
for over 600 years old, they are really remarkable.
What is very attractive is seeing in the infrared his underdrawing, which is very distinctive,
this very bold, strong, characteristic hatching. You do get something a little more direct
and raw in the underdrawing, because it was never
planned to be seen, and [it's] like peeking behind the curtain at the artist, almost in
a more contemporary sense. Because there were a number of panels and
the gilding was such an integral part of the works, I did a sort of dance with Cynthia
Moyer, our frame conservator. Cynthia Moyer: I've never treated anything
like this before. Gold is such an interesting material, because it's a solid material but
it reflects light at the same time. It's a gilding tradition that, when you do
your final gilding, you coat it with a varnish or a
protein-based glue or egg-based material. But that changes over time, especially over
centuries. And if you think about candles burning in a church, the soot that's generated
sticks to that material, and it just darkens and darkens and darkens over time.
In conservation it's often a process of discovery. I was able to use a product that helped me
just take sort of the darkness out of the coating without stripping it bare. And slowly
the quality and the condition revealed itself.
The cleaning at the top was revealing beautiful, intact gilding. Whereas along the bottom rail,
that molding and those bases on the capitals were coated with overgildings and paint and
lots of layers that were much more difficult to unpack.
Because these wooden substrates on all the
panels were subject to moisture and insect infestation, the flames up on top of the Virgin
were really damaged, and very fragile, we really had to make some rash decisions about
replacing the flames and the knobs and accurately depicting this recreated flame
form. And then I gessoed and gilded traditionally to match the original gilding that had been
cleaned. And the gold is 24 karat, so it's amazingly
wonderful sort of lemony, lustrous. So I'm using
traditional materials and I'm using traditional formulas and I'm using traditional
techniques to recreate the method. After you've laid the leaf then I use my agate
burnisher and rub it. And it's supposed to look
like solid gold, and it does. And then you put 470 years of patina and toner on top to
try to reduce it back down to the level of history
that the other parts have. If you look at the
completed project, hopefully your eye doesn't jump to the new gilding, and it integrates
with the original. Michael Gallagher: I started with the removal
of discolored varnish while she was still working on the actual framing elements.
All of the retouching is done with materials that are stable and reversible. Abrasion is
tricky. When you have a small paint loss and you have the surrounding original intact,
you know, it's slightly groping for something
in the dark, because a paint layer that's rubbed
through, it's not a clear-cut loss, and you want to find a happy medium between doing
enough, but not too much. I actually did a brush varnish in order to keep it away from
the gold and just varnished the painted elements.
Cynthia Moyer: A two-year project is extraordinary. It's maddening and crazy, but the end
result is so gratifying. It's sort of awe-inspiring when you walk in that gallery. I think
Giovanni di Paolo and his patrons and the people in Cortona who prayed at this church
would be grateful for someone's care. Michael Gallagher: One of the biggest changes
was just how the figures against the clean gold background worked in this. They had a
presence that was not there at all before. In a
certain kind of way, this is a very standard intervention, but I honestly feel that's sort
of where the nobility of the profession lies,
because the majority of things we work on, they're
not celebrity objects. Our job is to look after those with the same degree of care and love
I was away, like many people, during lockdown,
and just arriving back here, I totally filled up in seeing the space. And the very first
day I was back, all I had to do was prep a cart. And
it was incredibly satisfying to just prep this cart, to be able to be around and handle
works of art again. And it was a wonderful reminder
of what an incredible privilege that is to be
around objects and to work on them.