Retouching a Renaissance masterpiece | Restoring Botticelli part 2 of 3 | National Gallery

Some restorers might dot around different colours, they might do all the red lake bits, but I just love building back a picture, particularly a very damaged one like this, seeing it sort of come back to some sort of unity. It's never going to be total because it's got a long history, but it is even now for me very, very pleasing to be able to see how a can come together to some extent, particularly one with a history like this one. Hello, I'm Jill Dunkerton and I'm a restorer in the Conservation Department here at the National Gallery. Since we last saw this painting at the end of the removal of the frame, a great deal has happened. I've been working for several months on the retouching of the damage to the painting. This has been quite a story because initially when we began work on the painting, when the frame was still on, we knew that there'd been a lot of damage caused tragically by a severe overcleaning in the 19th century, but there didn't seem to be enough information to do anything other than a very general compromise restoration of parts of the architecture and of the rocks. You can't just make things up, but when we took the frame off, we discovered that all along the top where it had been protected by the frame, we had almost undamaged original paint. This was very exciting, full of information, but it created a huge problem initially because I couldn't think how I was ever going to be able to tie together visually so that it wasn't disturbing the well-preserved paint and the very damaged paint, until I suddenly realised something. It's long been known that this part of the landscape, the rocks and the little town, of course when we now see more of it as a result of the removal of the frame, was a direct quotation from a composition by Jan van Eyck showing the stigmatisation of St Francis. This painting was obviously immensely successful. Two versions have survived to this day and there must have been one of these versions in Florence and it created a sensation among Florentine painters and so it was quoted here. But I suddenly realised I'd been looking at these rocks up here, I'd seen these somewhere before, and then I suddenly realised that they were actually also taken from the Jan van Eyck. This meant that it was possible for me to, in the restoration, reconstruct at least to a certain level the rocks copying Jan van Eyck, just as Botticelli in Filipino lipi had done, back into the painting. It was quite a challenge because Jan van Eyck is a very different technique and style and I had to copy Jan van Eyck back into the painting in the manner of Filipino lipi, but all the while using our modern restoration materials which are not tempera paints but soft resin varnishes. What I don't want to lose is this beautiful freedom of handling of the tempera paint. The little brush strokes are all still visible, you mustn't overdo it or then you get something that looks sort of dead really. We must keep the life in the painting and it's old, it's always going to look slightly damaged. I'd rather that. Paintings in wonderful condition at this period are rare and this one has had a very tough life so far. Everything we do now in modern conservation is using materials which are reversible, so these soft resin paints are easily dissolved. The same solvent that I'm using to soften the paint to put it on can then be used to remove it in the future and I'm sure that will happen one day, but I hope not too soon. We don't use exactly the same pigments as the artists because some of them are not stable, some of the pigments they used are very toxic and even when they're no longer allowed to. Another fascinating thing about the figures is, and this is so typical of Botticelli, is how strongly characterised they all are. You would think if you were having to do this number of people you would tend to give them all the same sort of features, but they've all got different expressions, they're all doing different things. I'm particularly fond of these figures up here who are just bystanders because a fight has broken out here, rather nasty with an axe and a sword, and they're just looking, you know, oh what's happening? And they're just done with a few flicks of the brush. Botticelli can tell a story, animate his figures, even at this early stage of his career with astonishing fluency and confidence and humour. I think there's humour in this as well. Another fascinating consequence of the removal of the frame is that we now understand better how the painting was organised in three levels. Before, when the frame was there, you can see that it looked as though this was a continuous space and that these figures were much smaller than these ones and so you think, well it's just sort of naive incompetency, these are young artists, but in fact that's not how it's meant to be at all because recovering these blocks here shows that all these people are at a lower level to this group here and so to come up into this part of the painting they have to come up some hidden steps through the doorway. So you have one level here, one level here, and then you go up slightly again to the group with the Virgin and Child and Saint Joseph. It's been incredibly rewarding working my way slowly across the figures because they are so beautifully painted and I now know that this is really going to work when these figures are finally retouched.