In an art conservation lab at the University of Delaware last week, they were painting like it was 1399.
Hard at work was a select group of art educators, curators and scholars from throughout the United States who took part in an intensive, weeklong workshop sponsored by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and organized and taught by UDs Department of Art Conservation.
The program was designed to give todays professionals hands-on experience in using the same types of materials and techniques as traditional Italian painters of the late 14th and early 15th centuries. In addition to an appreciation for how such artists worked, the participants also left the workshop with a piece they created and will use in educating others about traditional painting methods.
The 12 professionals invited to attend the workshop spent some long days in one of the campus conservation laboratories, involved in the painstaking process of creating a replica of a piece of art, titled St. Romuald, by Lorenzo Monaco (1372-1424). Participants, who also went on field trips to three area museums, described the hands-on work as fascinating and enlightening.
I definitely have more appreciation for this process than I did before, said Elizabeth Gallerani, of the Williams College Museum of Art, as she experimented with different mixes of pigment and egg yolk to get the precise color she needed for her egg tempera painting. I wont ever look at this [kind of art] the same way again.
Curator Andrea Rosen, of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, had been a studio art major as an undergraduate and said it was fun to be in a painting class again. But this is certainly a different technique, so Im learning a lot, she said.
Before the painting process itself, each participant began with a wood panel, coated with gesso layers to create a white base, and then added fragile gold leaf to the appropriate areas, using a special red bole (a type of adhesive clay) applied over the white gesso.
They then carefully burnished the gold with a hand-held instrument to make it smooth and shiny and using a tiny punch tool and miniature hammer decorated the gold-covered areas of the painting with patterns of holes. The remaining white areas were then ready for painting.