3 years of conservation work on Piero's Nativity | Before and after

The restoration of Piero della Francesca's nativity is now complete. It's been through a long and complex treatment involving cleaning, panel work and also now a very very long and complicated restoration of the damage through splits, through flake losses and a very dramatic part of the panel treatment was the need to insert a thin sliver of wood down this join because when it was rejoined in the mid-19th century, probably when the painting came to England, they actually planed down the edges of the boards and we lost a bit of paint and so there was nowhere to restore the damage. We have put in this tiny fillet of wood which was a very complex operation but that has allowed me to retouch through the join. There's now room for the eye of the angel, the rose of the lute is perfect and of course Piero's perspective is critical and then on down through the fold of the drapery and the child's hands. The aim of this restoration was to try and make a more coherent painting than we'd had before. What the aim was was enough for people not to just look at what's happened to their shepherds, why do they look so different, but also to stop them from jumping forward which they did before because you were seeing the light-coloured gesso and the aim of retouching the shepherds was to make them go back into space so that we had this coherent space that Piero had planned. The number of things we've seen in this picture that nobody had ever seen before is quite alarming actually. You realise such a famous picture you can go on and on looking at it and these things emerge. What these light patches are is where a shaft of light is bursting through the hole in the stable roof. Now even that hole in the roof wasn't very clear before especially when it had a dirty varnish so it's streaming through and catching the stones. This is a real typical Piero idea, he's fascinated by light. This light is significant because it actually means something. It must relate to the idea of God's light coming from outside, falling on the roof and then that of course immediately makes sense of the gesture of the shepherd, if he is a shepherd and I think he probably is, who's pointing up to the hole in the roof and drawing our attention to it. The representation of this picture with this very different way of restoring it is radical but it is reversible. Everything we use can be dissolved off with very, very mild solvents. This has always been a much loved painting but I think most of us when looking at it we thought oh but what a shame, what a pity that this whole area was so damaged. We've learned to live with it and accommodate it but what I hope now is people will understand much better the painting as a whole because it is actually the most beautifully and cleverly designed picture, wonderfully well balanced. We have an exciting plan to relaunch the painting for Christmas. It's not going to go into a big gallery with lots of other pictures, it's going to go in a rather small room all by itself, no other paintings because we want to encourage people to contemplate the picture and also perhaps catch some of the mood of the painting. It's a really quiet contemplative picture, it's almost a meditation and it would be lovely to think that people could just sit or stand quietly in front of the picture and let it capture them because it does do that.