This is a painting by Botticelli, or from Botticelli's workshop, of the Virgin and Child

with Four Angels. And it's from the Wernher Collection, which is displayed at Ranger's

House on Blackheath. Botticelli is a really popular artist, and

has been for a long time, and as a consequence of that there are lots of paintings that are

maybe not by him but by later followers or copyists. And we were never entirely sure,

or in recent years not entirely sure about exactly what our painting was in terms of

how close it was to him as an artist, and what we can say now after talking to lots

of experts and really examining this painting really closely in the studio: we now are fairly

sure that it is definitely from the workshop of Botticelli and so made in his studio space

by his assistants - perhaps not by the hand of the Master himself, but we're not too worried

about that. We think it was made in his workshop and the

person who purchased this work would have been buying, as far as they were concerned,

a Botticelli. We used lots of different scientific approaches

when we were investigating this painting. We look very closely under the microscope

before we even start. We carried out an X-ray on the painting, which

shows the panel construction. We used infrared reflectography, which shows us the initial

underdrawing, or at least some of the initial underdrawing, that was done in the studio

before this painting was put together. It may not have captured all of the underdrawing,

there's possibly some things that we can't see, but it does show quite a lot of broad

sketching-out and painting-in of the composition before the paint was applied.

I went out to Florence to the Uffizi to see the prime version, and spent him a long time

in the gallery in front of the picture along with the hundreds of members of the general

public, which was frankly an amazing experience; to stand in front of it for so long, knowing

that I had a little version of the big picture at home in the studio.

If you imagine a work like this being produced in the 15th century, it wasn't something that

one person could do on their own so popular artists like Botticelli would have had a large

workshop with lots of different craftsmen. Maybe somebody preparing the panels, people

preparing pigments, and people doing the drafting and the painting, and he wouldn't have worked

on all of the pieces himself. In our case, the painting would have been

made by his assistants, but it would have still been sold from that workshop as a Botticelli

and the people who bought it would have understood what that meant.

They weren't paying for the most expensive piece of work, but equally they were paying

for something from the Botticelli workshop. It's really interesting restoring a painting

of this age, from around 1480 or 1490, because you have hundreds of years of different restorations

and interventions that have been made, and actually what it feels like is a kind of mini-microscopic

archaeology as you begin to peel back those later restorations, which have probably been

made in good faith, but which are now not doing any great service to the picture, to

get back as close as you can to the original intention of the artist.

When you're working on a painting like this, you're with it for literally hundreds of hours.

And you do become incredibly connected to it. The funny thing is though as a conservator

you're connecting with the physicality of it, not so much the subject matter, but the

brushstrokes and the… and the wood and the paint.

It's really amazing to work on a painting by Botticelli. When you do art history at

school or university, it's such an iconic name and suddenly to have one that you are

really close to and working on with your own hands is quite an extraordinary experience.