Mazzolino's Masterpiece: Science and Conservation in Focus

My name is Aoife Brady and I am the Gallery's curator of Italian and Spanish art. I'm delighted to talk to you today about Ludovico Mazzolino's Crossing of the Red Sea. This magnificent painting was made by Ludovico Mazzolino, one of the leading painters of the cities of Ferrara and Bologna in northern Italy. Our painting is signed and dated 1521, so we know that it derives from this important time in Mazzolino's career. It depicts the Old Testament subject of the crossing of the Red Sea. The painting was purchased by the Gallery in 1914 and as early as the 1930s we record condition issues associated with the panel. These problems associated with the stability of the panel's paint layer mean that in recent years we haven't been able to display it for our visiting public. Thanks now to the TEFAF Museum Restoration Fund we have been able to finally address some of these issues inherent to the painting and to research Mazzolino's materials and technique. And we hope that all of this information together will better our understanding of this extraordinary Renaissance artist and his working methods and help other people with similar conservation projects in the future. Very little is known about Ludovico Mazzolino's early career, but we do think that he trained with an artist called Ercole di Roberti in Bologna and later with another master called Lorenzo Costa. We have a wonderful Holy Family by Costa in our collection. This composition, while Italian in origin, shows a lot of influence from artists beyond the Alps. We see, for example, the inspiration of Albert Dürer and Lucas Cranach. In this strange and interesting perspective that the artist takes, he would have consulted their prints which were in wide circulation on the peninsula at the time. The scale is really extraordinary. While usually Mazzolino's working on a very small scale, here he scales up but he doesn't spare any detail. He still applies the same level of attention to every single figure in the composition. Each of them are depicted with their own expressions and their own distinctive poses. Moses appears on the right-hand side of the composition, having saved the Israelites from the pursuing Egyptians. He raises a staff to bring the Red Sea across the composition and it envelops the pursuing army. A flurry of bodies appear entangled with one another as they drown and struggle against the waves. Some of the scientific and technical analysis that has been carried out on this panel has revealed extraordinary details of the artist's working process. So we can see, for example, through infrared reflectograph, the way in which he's mapped out his composition. And we can see every single little character sketched out using this wonderful free line drawing. And then Mazzolino edits as he works. He removes some of these characters. They don't appear in the final edition, so to speak, of his painting. And so we know that Mazzolino has a large repository of characters of these studies to draw upon and he decides selectively who he'll include in the final product. My name is Maria Canavan. I'm a paintings conservator here at the National Gallery of Ireland. And for the last few months, I have been engrossed in working on this beautiful panel by Ludovico Mazzolino. People often say, when I tell them that I work in conservation, they often say that I must be very patient. But I would say nothing could be further from the truth, especially when working on a painting such as this, because there are so many different exciting aspects to the project. And there's so much going on, not only on the surface of the painting, as you can see, but in devising a conservation treatment. And I'm working with colleagues as well to try to look into and establish the techniques of the artist. And we've been able to really understand, I think, much more fully his process and then apply that to the conservation treatment of the painting. Part of the initial process of planning a project like this would involve really very in-depth research and very in-depth looking at the panel, whether that be the surface layer such as the varnish and whatever sort of dirt might be on the surface, all the way down to the ground layer, the way the artist prepared the panel, the panel itself, the front to the back of the whole lot. So alongside the conservation investigations in the studio, we would do some very in-depth technical analysis with our new scientific research facility here, and also technical imaging that can give us a better idea of the parts of the panel that we can't see with the naked eye. So we put all that together in a dossier and we're able to look at every aspect of the condition of the panel so that it gives us a really good way to make sure that we're making informed decisions about conservation treatment, but also to try to gaze into the future a little bit and try to understand what the treatments that we do today will look like in years to come as well. So we like to make sure that what we're doing is reversible, number one. Number two, it's a minimal intervention, so it's something that we do as much as we can to keep the panel stable and to preserve it. We want to make sure that the panel is as original as possible and that we leave well enough alone where that is the case. Honestly, it's been such a wonderful project to be involved in because, as you can see, the painting is so rich in detail. You know, you could go in every day, you would find something new on it because there's so many figures, there's so much detail there. Every part, every square centimetre of the painting is covered in just amazing, interesting detail, so it's something that's just been a joy to work on. I'm Natalia Macro, I'm the Research Scientist in Conservation at the National Gallery of Ireland. It's like a puzzle, so we're putting together all the pieces so we get a clearer view of the artwork, how it was made, what materials were used. We've been able to investigate in detail this incredible masterpiece from Ludovico Mazzolino, from the material perspective. So in this particular case, we wanted to have information on the stratigraphy of the panel and in order to do so, we'll take a sample and we'll embed it in resin and create a cross-section where we can see all the layers. A lot of that information was focused on the pigment because Mazzolino used a very complex pigment palette, a lot of different pigments were mixed together in a very skilful way. We were really excited to see that Mazzolino used ultramarine, which is a very expensive, very precious material. We weren't expecting to see such an extended use and that was really exciting and we were really happy about that. This kind of collaborative work really speaks to the Gallery's ethos. Research is at the heart of everything we do and when we work together we find, we discover new insights and we can really enrich our knowledge and by using a disciplinary approach to a project like this, combining scientific conservation and art historical knowledge, we can get really keen and interesting views into artworks, how they're made and how we can best care for them as an institution. This painting has spent far too long in storage from our perspective for a masterpiece of its calibre and we're very excited to bring it back to public view. It's such a special thing, it's exciting, it's strange, it's lots of fun and I think it's something that's going to become a beloved work in our public collection for those who don't know it already.