Week 3: Panel

A view from the Palazzo Vecchio. 

Restoration Ethics

Max went through restoring books, paper, and archival documents. It was relatively straightforward, he outlined the various properties of different data storage methods (stone, metal, clay, paper, papyrus, laser disk, etc.) such as availability, chemical stability, forgery potential, etc. He also touched on the crossover of data and art, such as manuscripts and calligraphy from places like China that emphasize the artistic quality of the writing, and how we consider them. Overall, very informative, and it stuck out to me that laser disk storage such as are only chemically stable for 30-50 years, which feels so short! So much of the technology we develop feels so fallible to me these days, so impermanent. 

The following lecture provided a brief history of museums (think colonialism/exploration) and their pros and cons regarding art stewardship. Considerations such as de-contextualization of the artworks, whether they're better served in the museum or in their original locations as well as types of museums (encyclopedic, local, specialized, conservatorium). I'm very engaged by museum studies and things like display and interpretation, I’m not sure I have the education to fill a position like that but the work does interest me. That segued nicely into the talk on Collections, how they can give meaning to decontextualized objects and create narratives in general as repositories of memories. This allowed me to talk briefly about the collections management work I’ve done, albeit limited. 

After this was a lecture on framing and how frames contextualize space and artwork. This doesn't always mean a physical frame applied around an artwork to protect it but includes spatial frames in exhibitions and margins around books, for example. This was followed by going through the cleaning process for paintings and what to clean or not clean, how restoration is always inherently destructive to some degree, so the goal is to minimize the harm done as much as possible.

Painting Theory 

Fabiola took over the lecture and started going through the properties and structure of wood as a support: how wood is mostly dead cells but still living, how it breathes through moisture, its physical structure and property differences between coniferous and deciduous. She also briefly outlined how philosophies changed from the Middle Ages on, from art was considered an expression of honor to God and then moved further away towards individualized expression (though not quite the free expression we see from the ~18th-c. on). Fabiola's next lesson addressed construction and techniques of panel painting on wood, going through how they're reinforced and the structure of them, what's applied to the surfaces and how its treated, how things change across medieval to renaissance period. She then covered gilding techniques, history of gold, differences in usage, etc. It was a useful primer to techniques that we applied to our panel painting: guazzo, mission, graffito and pastiglia, each with slightly different applications. She also talked about conchiglie, where fine gold dust is mixed with a binder and held in a seashell from which the artist dips their brush, but unfortunately this was outside the scope of our program. After this, Fabiola went through oil techniques and materials and painting supports, such as the stretcher and canvas, going into the materials used and during what periods of time.

Workshop 

In workshop we got our wood panels and the trim for the frame. We sanded the panels, cut the trim into four pieces each and cut the corners at 45-degree angles, then nailed them down. Then more sanding so it was all as smooth and as even as we could make it before impregnating the surface with rabbit skin glue. This is to create a moisture barrier so that the gesso has the appropriate surface before we move into the other preparatory layers and painting. 

 

We're going to do a few different techniques on the paintings, I chose to copy Klimt paintings for both of my projects now and I'm really excited about that. The gesso was a mix of finely sieved gypsum and the rabbit skin glue. 

Sieving the gypsum into the glue. Photo by Mark. 

Sanding the panel. Photo by Mark.  

Applying the gesso, alternating between horizontal and vertical strokes with each layer. Photo by Mark.  

It took several layers, and in between we measured the grids on our reference images to copy onto the panel the following day. Eventually, our panels were covered, and any gaps were filled to the best of our ability. The final step was to sand them with progressively finer sand paper, then cleaning them with alcohol before they were ready for the image transfer.

With the image penciled onto our panels, we started gilding and painting. On stone walls, gilding is applied last, but on panel it’s one of the first steps. We started with pastiglia, a 3-dimensional application where you create a protruding effect with a thick gypsum/rabbit skin glue mixture then apply mission on top, which is an adhesive for the gold leaf. Then we painted on bolo, a clay for the guazzo gilding that acts as a cushion and allows you to burnish it and make it super shiny. 

Here, you can see the reddish bolo and the pastiglia on the upper corners.  

Beginning to paint with tempera by filling in the hair, and the pastiglia has now been covered with mission in preparation for gilding. 

Gilding applied to the areas with bolo, painting continued to develop. Fabiola demonstrated how to use the tempera paint, how it dries quickly and you have to build up opacity through small strokes and layers. My classmate is an oil painter, and the bulk of my own traditional painting has been in watercolor and gouache, and it was fascinating to see how that manifested in our approaches with the tempera - neither of us quite followed Fabiola's demonstration and the experience of our painting practices was evident in the manner of coverage on the panel. 

Applying tempera over gilding where the tempera will be scratched away to show the gold. You may notice in the photo above this one that the space above the woman (Judith)'s shoulders that I applied tempera first. This was an unfortunate mistake in order of operations, and caused trouble with the graffito process. Properly, the panel is left smooth and unpainted, then gilded, then the tempera is applied over it in a thick layer that gets scratched away. This felt counter-intuitive to me at the time given how expensive gold was and how much would be left hidden out of sight under the pigment layer, but ultimately for this process it is easier to remove the paint from the gold than vice versa, as I learned. 

From here through the end of the program, we began working on the oil painting and alternated back and forth depending on what needed to dry or set. 

We stretched the linen canvas and nailed them down and applied a thick ground of powdered pigment and oil, which was left to dry over the weekend. Returning to the gilding on the panel, the bolo had completed dried out overnight so we pivoted to applying that method on a different area. The clay should still have moisture in it when the gilding is applied, but the heat wave affected the dry time of some processes. We successfully applied mecca, which is applied over silver leaf (or tin, but we used silver) to make it appear gold. 

Regarding the frame, the top is guazzo (polished or burnished leaf), left and right are mission gilding, bottom is mecca. 

Guest Lecture: Paola Pogliani

Paola Pogliani is a teacher at Tuschia University where we toured the laboratories and where Fabiola studied. The talk was on the Study of Artistic Techniques for the Knowledge & Conservation of Works of Art- basically everything the painting class has been studying between our lessons and Max's. She touched on the technology they use for diagnostics at the very end and I think it would've been more interesting if she had focused more on this – I did offer in my feedback for the class that more consideration could be given to the guest lecturers and communicating with them about what content is covered within the course and what might be more rewarding and unique to listen to outside of our proper lectures.