“Are you an eagle or a mole?” my supervisor once asked me when I was a third year undergraduate considering whether or not to stay on for a research degree.
“Oh, definitely an eagle,” I replied airily, “I like to look at the big picture.”
Many years later, I have finally realised that I am not an eagle, but a mole; and a pretty limited one at that, buried in the intricacies of medieval building practices and an obscure church in the back end of Norfolk. So it was a treat to find myself surrounded by other moles looking at a very big picture in the Courtauld Institute the other week.
Botticelli, Trinity with Saints, 1491-94 (Courtauld Institute)
Botticelli’s Trinity was ideal talpidaen material. This is a painting with lots to see and wonder about in the composition, but, as Scott Nethersole was to reveal over the next two days, with plenty more that is just as fascinating lurking beneath the surface.
We burrowed deep into the detail, not just of the picture, but of the fabric itself – down through the varnish, to the pigments, the gesso and canvas patching, the poplar panels, the dowels, the wormholes; right through to the battens and out the other side. Thanks to Scott, as our investigations developed, we were gradually armed with a range of tools and techniques. With these we discovered things that no eagle could ever know; at least not without x-ray eyes, or infrared lenses, or microscopic analysis of the tiniest flecks of paint. (Or without turning the painting around and looking at the back).
We learnt to be careful of the traps and pitfalls of material analysis too. From the challenges presented by fakes and the limitations of pigment analysis, to Christina Young’s highly illuminating session on light: on the nature of photons and wave-lengths, and on what x-rays and infra-red can and can’t show. We were reminded, too, how wary moles must be when making claims about what such images might, or might not reveal.
Of particular appeal to me was the time spent on the timber and the carpentry. I am fascinated by what can be deduced from analysing the fabric with the naked eye alone – from the white stains on sides of the panel (suggesting it has never been trimmed), to the idea that the order of scenes in a dismembered predella could be ascertained by matching the grain running along the backs. In fact I now realise that it was Scott’s work that had already piqued my interest in this – at his Devotion by Design exhibition at the National Gallery in 2011, when several altarpieces were displayed with their backs exposed.
Best of all though during our time at the Courtauld, was the infrared (IR) revelation of the underdrawing in the Trinity. Not only did we get an insight into why there was something fishy about Tobias and the Angel, but we could see that the exact positioning of the cross in the landscape was clearly altered by (presumably) Botticelli at a late stage in the composition of the image. The strange distortion of space he created was not the result of an oversight, nor a failure to understand perspective, but a conscious adjustment by the painter.