Making the golden haloes from botticellis workshop sparkle - national gallery

We can't really see the pattern of the original painting now but we can see it in the UV light and it was very helpful in creating this reconstruction and being very precise. And we think of this conservation department as really focusing on the restoration of paintings and the reconstruction of paintings and of course this is a gilding which is you know so much part of the paintings that we look after but it is a different skill set and so that's going to be your challenge I think. Hello my name is Laura Llewellyn, I'm Curator of Italian Paintings before 1500 here at the Gallery and I'm here with Valeria. And I'm Valeria Kravchenko, Patrick Lindsay Conservation Fellow. This morning we are looking at this painting probably produced in the workshop of Sandra Botticelli. In the years after his return to Florence he establishes a very large and thriving workshop, very very prolific and one of the things that this workshop really specialises in is images of the Madonna and Child and they really churn these works out in a sort of serial production. This one I have to say is one of my favourites, one of the most beautiful, one of the more refined and one that I'm particularly excited that we've had the opportunity to bring up into the conservation studio and for Valeria to work on its treatment. At this stage the old yellow varnish was removed, the colour transformation is amazing because before that you couldn't really see the blue, it looked like greenish yellow and you couldn't really understand the true colours of the painting and I'm personally very pleased with the results. I was very pleased too, it's really, it's looking absolutely fantastic. So what we're looking at is a virgin child, she's a little over half length and he is perched on a ledge in front of her and she's kind of wrapping her arms around him and of course the really striking feature of the composition is this pomegranate at the centre, the child is holding onto it and this is a very typical symbol found in images of the Madonna and Child. We have many examples in the 15th century Italian paintings collection here, examples from the workshop of the Bellini brothers, Filippino Lippi and also Antonello da Messina. In wider culture the pomegranate is sometimes interpreted as a symbol of fertility or fecundity but in these images of the Virgin and Child more often the pomegranate is included as a reference to the child's future suffering. And I think what is unique about this painting is that he's actually like playing with the seeds, he's not just holding the pomegranate and it just looks so real, so childish. Exactly. I have a bit of a fascination with halos by Botticelli and people working alongside Botticelli because they just seem to get ever more intricate and no two are ever the same. I took quite a few photomicrographs to have a closer look at the gilding and when I was sure that a lot of it is a reconstruction then we took some samples and looked at the cross section and we just actually confirmed that there is a varnish layer and it was safe to remove the reconstructed gilding so we wasn't damaging the original. The original gilded pattern was quite different from what we saw with previous reconstruction so now we have a chance to do a more precise job to represent the original idea of this painting. We made a decision to remove the reconstruction. As we can see the halo of a child is much more intact and it's in much better condition and it's much easier to do a reconstruction on it now but as we can see on the version's halo it's been damaged quite a lot unfortunately. The overall treatment has been very satisfying, very straightforward but I think one of the challenges that you're now going to face is how we go about reconstructing potentially the areas of lost gold. This is my test for the gilding pattern before starting on the actual panel. I was testing different materials how it would look like and my main goal was to achieve like this level of thinness and intricacy with gilding because this is what we want for proper reconstruction on the panel. With this bit on my test I was trying to recreate Virgin's halo on the right. When I was happy with what I'm achieving I decided that I can start actual reconstruction on the panel. So today is the 13th of January and I've been working only on gilding reconstruction for already for two months. I'm really looking forward to finishing this project and it will take me probably another week to finish gilding reconstruction. With the child's halo I reinforced the circles so we can see the shape of the halo more properly and also a bit of the pattern as well but I didn't reconstruct everything because we still wanted to look as it's an old gilding so we don't want to look at too new. With Virgin's halo I needed to reconstruct almost everything. There was like tiny little bits of gilding left of original gilding but luckily we were able to see everything in the UV light so I had a perfect idea how to do it, how to put it back. At this stage it's almost done and I will finish this bit. We can see that this halo looks a bit older than this one if we can say so so what I'm doing I'm recreating everything and then I'm just breaking it down to look a bit more natural and also exciting bit about this gilding reconstruction project is that we were able to restore the star and also like these tiny little details which we couldn't see before but we were able to see it in the UV light and it was just such a revelation so we were able to reconstruct it properly and so we can see it how the artist originally intended. If you're interested to learn more about art you can click here or here and subscribe to our YouTube channel and thank you so much for watching!