Restoring Paolo Uccello's 'Battle of San Romano' | Part 2 | National Gallery

The painting came up here for restoration in the beginning of September 2022, so it's taken somewhere around 18 months to complete, and this is the only painting I've worked on during that time. It's amazing how dusty it gets right by the doors. There is already a video of the cleaning of the painting, but today we're just going to talk about the actual restoration of the picture. So when we see a painting like this in a frame hanging on the walls of a gallery, we might think that it looks very similar to how it left the painter's studio, but that is usually not the case, and particularly not the case with this particular painting. Hello, my name is Imogen Tebre and I'm one of the curators at the National Gallery. I'm standing here in the conservation studio with Paul Ackroyd, and we're going to be talking about Uccello's Battle of San Romano. So it's July 2024. As you will see, the painting has been beautifully restored by Paul, and this is our final moment to look at the painting together before it goes back on the walls of our galleries. So we thought we would take a moment to have a This is unique in the earlier part of our collection as a large-scale secular painting. It is one of three paintings by Paolo Uccello depicting the Battle of San Romano. The other two survive today, and they are in the Uffizi in Florence and the Louvre in Paris, but ours is unique in our collection for its subject and for its scale. This is a skirmish that took place between Florence and Lucca on the 1st of June 1432, and here we have a particular moment in the battle which takes place at dawn, hence the beautiful luminous glow of the of the kind of purples and pinks of the ground and of the hills behind. And the battle takes place against this gorgeous sort of tapestry background of oranges and pomegranates and rose bushes, like the kind of courtly garden you might find in contemporary tapestries, but here seen as a backdrop to a kind of bloodless battle taking place in the foreground. We think that Paolo Uccello painted this in the late 1430s. He painted it probably for a patron called Leonardo Bartolini Salimbeni, and Leonardo was the head of the Council of Ten that was really heavily involved in Florence's battle against Lucca. So this painting and the others in the series was probably commissioned to commemorate his role in those battles, and it was probably commissioned for his marriage in 1438, although we're not entirely sure about that. But the painting looked quite different in that moment. Yes, I mean when it was originally painted it had an arch top which goes about another 64-65 centimetres up at the top of the arch, and in these corner pieces here, when the painting was exhibited in Bartolini's palace, there was corbels, stone corbels on the walls, so there was nothing here. But in 1484 Lorenzo Medici commandeers the paintings, the whole three paintings, and he chops off the top of the arch and has somebody fill in the two corners here and here, and has someone paint the leaves of the trees and the oranges etc in that top part. Yeah, so that forcible acquisition of the paintings is really interesting, and the Medici were actually exiled as a result, partly as a result of the Battle of San Romano, and so Lorenzo's interest in these paintings is perhaps a little more complex. Nonetheless, we know that they were certainly in the Palazzo Medici in 1492 when they're recorded in an inventory as being in Lorenzo's room on the ground floor of the palace. We then know that they stayed in the Medici collection for quite a long time. The next inventory records them in the later 16th century when they've been moved to a corridor near a chapel, and that could possibly be a moment when other interventions were made. Yes, it's maybe when this sort of rectangular piece was cut out here, and miraculously that piece was kept and then stuck back in later on. The painting then stays in the Medici family again, and it's recorded in the collection of a Medici cardinal in 1666. So the National Gallery is founded in 1824, and this painting is acquired in 1857. So the first director, Sir Charles East Lake, was interested in acquiring a group of early Italian pictures, and he acquired this among several from a pair of Florentine dealers, Paolo Lombardi and Ugo Baldi, who were preparing these pictures for market, and they sort of conceived of a group of early Italian pictures that would tell the story of the history of art before Raphael, and they seem to have made some quite sizable interventions at this point as well. Yes, they fully restored the painting, they cleaned it, and during that cleaning they probably caused some abrasion to the paint. But then the painting didn't receive much attention until much later on in its time at the Gallery, is that right? Yeah, not until the early 1960s. So really this painting has had an extremely complicated physical history, as well as moving from collection to collection, and finally finding its resting place here. So your treatment has had to engage with all of those moments in its history, not just that moment when it was in Uccello's studio. The painting is now part the way through the restoration stage, the retouchings and so on, and I've done quite a bit in the landscape, in the background, and now this green foliage behind the figures makes the figures stand out more now that all the damages have been retouched. So mostly during the restoration stage what we're dealing with is retouching these white losses. Most of these white losses have resulted from the panel coming apart at some point. Some of them are joins in the panel and some of them are splits. This is probably a split going across here, and also areas of abrasion like you can see here where some of the paint has been worn away, and particularly in the silver leaf where a lot of the silver and the black modelling is missing, and in the heads of course. At the moment I'm really working on the horses. I've pretty much finished this horse here and near to finishing this dark horse here. They've lost a lot of modelling through being over-cleaned. They're both painted with a darker underlayer with very thin washes of colour on top to achieve the modelling, and a lot of that thin colour has been worn away. So those will look a little bit more three-dimensional. There's always been sort of concern about these kind of geometric sort of shapes that you get in the modelling which look quite unrealistic, particularly in this horse here and to some extent here. That might be explained by the fact that this is a painting of the battle when it began, which probably began at dawn and in moonlight. So that would explain why you have this kind of silvery tones in the landscape here, and this rather pale looking sort of earth at the bottom, but also the way that these are modelled with these quite strong highlights, and particularly here where you have quite a hard edge. And there's really no evidence of anything really being removed, particularly from this sort of area at all, and this is how they probably would have looked originally. Towards the end of the restoration I'll start to tackle the more difficult areas such as the armour here, which is the silver leaf which has been painted over by Uccello with a sort of dark browny-black pigment to achieve the modelling. But it is quite difficult to retouch this because you've got to sort of imitate the silver with something, and it's very difficult to get the right kind of reflectance from the surface of the silver. So that will be a bit awkward, and also it's just retouching it to leave it at a level where it still looks a little bit worn. So here I'm just touching out the black in the chain mail which has been partly worn away, just dotting out some of the wear. The little white hook shapes of the chain mail are pretty okay, they haven't been damaged, but it's all the little bits of black in between which have been eroded away in a previous cleaning. They're quite small damages but once they've been retouched out it really sharpens up the detail. In the 19th century these areas have been very heavily restored, in fact a lot of the armour had been re-silvered and repainted with the black and brown glazes which looked really quite odd. As you spend a lot of time looking at the picture and working on it you notice all sorts of little details. I've liked working on the horses, I quite like the way the horse's teeth are repeated all the way across the painting until you get to the end one where its open mouth has a flower in it, which I don't know whether that was deliberate but it could be quite playful. And there are details like this with the horse's hoof on a patch of grass, it's just gone down, the horse's hoof has squashed the grass out like that. It's quite a nice sort of simple graphic way of explaining it. So the restoration has changed the appearance of the painting quite significantly. The varnish that was put on in the early 1960s had discoloured quite considerably and was quite uneven. The other areas that have been restored are the faces here which they'd lost a lot of modelling through abrasion, through previous cleanings. I've re-established some of the modelling in these faces but again there's a limit to how far you can go without completely repainting these passages. And there are other areas such as this green in the shield here which had been completely repainted with a chrome green colour in the 19th century. The original green underneath that is in very bad condition and it wasn't safe to remove the chrome green. But what I've done in that area is just to tone the green to a darker colour which matches something like the discoloured original greens. And again there was a lot of abrasion in the grey landscape particularly around this area which again has been restored so there's a greater sense of recession across this landscape now. In the landscape at the top in the 17th century a sky was added which went all the way across here missing the flag and up round here which had only been partially removed in the 1960s restoration. So there were large areas of this sky left over these trees here and these grasses and over these trees etc. In these areas it was quite clear what was originally there and you could see some of the forms beneath the 16th century sky paint. So it wasn't too problematic to reconstruct some of these trees by painting over that 16th century sky which had been left. Also in the 16th century, probably at the same time that the sky was put in across the top, some figures were added here. A couple of sort of farmers, some trees and some grasses across here and some grasses here. These quite clearly went into damages and into cracks and were quite crudely painted in and they were also the wrong scale because the figures were quite small in relation to these figures here. So what I've done there is simply retouch out about that retouching but not removed it, not physically removed it. Well one of the last areas of the restoration is this sort of rectangular area which had been cut out at some point, probably when Lorenzo Medici decided to move the painting somewhere else in his palace and then probably to make way for a roof beam or something. So this area was cut out and then at some point later was reinstated, was glued back in. But in between times there was quite a lot of damage in this area. It was probably kept in a very damp place and a lot of the gesso and paint flaked off. In the 1960s restoration, this whole area was here and across here was covered with about 16 trees and there quite clearly isn't enough evidence for all of those trees at all. So in consultation with other colleagues in the department, the curatorial team as well as members of the scientific department, we have been in discussion as to what to do with this area. And so far we've decided to include a line of grasses, a hedge across here, similar to this here, which gives you a break between this part of the landscape and the far distant landscape. And in this area is exactly where the four centimetre band of loss is. There are some fragments here of original which indicate that there was some kind of foliage there, particularly here, which you have some sort of lines which go up like there, which indicate grasses. And also to include these lines of grass which indicate the contour of the landscape behind. Well we've had a lot of discussions about what to do with this area here, where there are these original fragments of green foliage. And we've gone through a number of different versions as you can see here about how to resolve this area. But for now we have decided to put in a row of three trees going here and one tree here which starts at the base of the hedge. This breaks up the monotony of having say four trees here, a whole line like a line of soldiers, and having this tree here starting at the base of the hedge as Uccello does here and here, means that it gives a kind of sense of recession because there's a difference in scale between these trees and this tree here. We've also decided to put in an indication of a small hedge here in the similar way that Uccello does here. Because as you can see in other parts of the picture, Uccello always puts the trees at the edge of the border of a field or a division in the landscape or along a path here. And this line of grasses will stop at the lance here, in a similar way to this landscape stopping at the lance here and then continuing to be a different kind of landscape over the other side of the lance. It's obvious that Uccello intended to put some trees here and without reconstructing these trees it would be disconcertingly, this area would look disconcertingly empty, rather like a row of teeth with a big gap in it. And when the painting's framed, that sense of something missing in that area will be accentuated. So this solution incorporates nearly all of the green fragments that are left there, apart from a few here. And once these trees have been reconstructed we'll then take a decision as to whether we might put in another tree here, again starting at the base of the hedgerow. I should also point out that all this reconstruction of these trees, as with all the rest of the restoration of the picture, is easily removable in the future and everything has been documented. All of the National Gallery's paintings have complicated histories but I think that the treatment of this painting and this conversation I think really illuminates how a whole history of an object is really encapsulated in the way that it looks. The recent restoration cannot bring the painting back to how Uccello originally intended it to look like. I mean to begin with we can't recreate the lost arch top, that would be completely impossible. The restoration has had to take into account all that has happened to it over the last 600 years. But there has been some sense of returning the picture to that kind of 1480s moment maybe. Yeah, yeah. And we're all really looking forward to having the painting back on the walls so that everyone can enjoy and appreciate it. 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