Art Restoration in Florence

             There is so much Christian Art all over Italy, especially the theme of Madonna and Child that at one point of time, I got almost sick of it. After understanding the different periods in artistic developments - from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, I begin to appreciate the changes represented in a recurring theme; and how challenging it must be for the artists at that time to continually be creative and find a way to breakthrough from their predecessors.

             For me studying art conservation, I was interested about the history of the art piece and even more intrigued by the techniques that go into making it. The study of materials used also involve ancient artistic techniques. When I look at them, I love to detect where they have been restored, the materials used and which techniques applied. 

            Here's a practise piece of restoring Filippo Lippi's Madonna and Child with Angels the original in the Uffizi. It's a calendar page, where my teacher selected sections to be cut off. The page is then mounted on a board. Sections that were cut off were mended with stucco or plaster.

The missing sections were then reconstructed by following the lines on sections of the painting that were preserved well. 

After the painting was restored with tempera colours, I worked on the decoration of the border with gold-leafing or known in Italian as doratura. The base was prepared by a clay like material known as bolo. It is a Fiorentine traditinal method, hence you can see a reddish base on most artworks with gold leafing. The design on the sides is a technique known as pastiglia or paste. It is done with thicker plaster and a very fine brush.

It is a technique to provide this relief effect. It is applied commonly to annotate areas of importance, like Madonna's halo or robes of noblemen. One example is in Gentile da Fabriano's Adoration of the Magi in Uffizi.

After the preparation of the bolo base, gold leafing technique called missione is applied. There are several methods of applying gold leaf, but for techniques with pastiglia relief, a dry method of the missione technique mentioned above is applied. In order to reduce the luminosity of the gold leaf, a very diluted coat of tempera (colours black and terra d'ombra naturale) is brushed lightly to give it an antique feel. This technique is known as patinatura. Patina the name given to the phenomenon of darkening over age on all materials.