After the overtaking of the church by Protestants, mural paintings in St Jacob’s Chapel in the Church of Our Lady in Gdańsk dating back to the thirties of the 15th century were painted white and until recently no one has known of their existence. This article is the second report published by the same authors on paintings in St Jacob's chapel. The first of them („Ochrona Zabytkow", 1983, nos 3 -4 , p. 258) concerned paintings on the buttress depicting a figure of Saint Jacobs and a scene of the Last Judgement, which were uncovered, preserved and restored in 1982. The present article contains a report of the uncovering, preservation and resoration of paintings on the walls of the altar's niche. The work was completed in 1986. The paintings in the niche depict the Holy Trinity, passion scenes from The Last Supper to Descent from the Cross as well as The Entombment and Descent to the Limbo. The two conservation projects, diffe rin g from each other with the employed method of making-ups, on tho buttress "tra tte g io ", in the niche "w a sh ing ", provided inspiration for a number of purposes and methods of restoration. These considerations provide the basic content of the present article. There was some reflection on whether or not and how to restore and how to reconcile some inconsistency between the value of the monument as a document and its d id a c tic and aesthetic function in a sacral in te rior. Qu o ting various voices and opinions the authors en deavoured to substantiate the decision to undertake reconstruction. A separate place was devoted to the method of introduced complements. An analysis was made of the reconstruction carried out on the buttress by the „tra tte g - g io " technique and its theoretical assumptions were considered. As a result of that „tra tte g io ” was replaced with washing, using water-colours fo r that purpose. To illustrate d ifficu ltie s encountered by the executor, restoration work on some scenes was described. Attention was paid to the importance of an iconographie interpretation to the form of making-ups introduced and the need fo r cooperation with an a rt historian in this field. Of interest is an inconsistency described herein of the historian and the conservato r in the scene of "The Entombment". Finally, the authors draw a ttention to the importance of a clear formulation of assumptions, thanks to which it is possible to foresee a fin a l form of the executed conservation project.
About 1960 during bricklayer’s works carried out in St Mary’s Church in Gdaństk, the workers of a Gdańsk Divisionof the Ateliers for Conservation of Cultural Property found out in a south aisle of the presbytery in St Jacob’s Chapel the existense of polychromy under old whitetewashes. It was then stated that was the painting depicting a detail of Last Judgement. The work on this wall painting has been recently resumed. The white-was-hes have been removed uncovering, for technical reasons, only small parts. The uncorvered painting has a form of a narrow belt (1,4 m wide and 9,3 m high). Conservation and restoration work was carried out by a team of workers from the Toruń University of Nicolaus Copernicus. After removing the remaining parts of white-washes from the painting with scalpes and bread crumb, plaster loosened from the base was cemented with a 15—25R/o water emulsion of vinyl poly acetate (Talens, Holand) with the addition of whiting as an extender. A serious problem represented yellow stains appeaning on the surface of the painting caused by a migration of ferric salts during smoothing down the blisters. It was possible to remove the staining partially by putting wet compresses from wood-wool. Attempts to impregnate blisters from inside with solutions of Paraloid in toluen and of PMB in acetone ended in failure. The missing parts in the painting were done with hatching (trateggio). Preserved parts of polychromy made it possible to reconstruct the form and colours of basic elements. Water-colour paints made by Talens and Winsor Newton were used for retouching. A preliminary stylistic analysis suggests the effect of Czech painting, pronounced in particular in the figure of St Jacob. A full hictoric and iconographie interpretation will be possible only after the uncovery of all polychromy.
A new variant of plying-up paintings with a high delicate texture proposed by G. A. Berger (Maltechnik— Restauro, I (1980, p. 50— 6 6 ) and which was to eliminate the pressure of foil upon a painting layer has been tested in practice and employed in the Department of the Conservation of Paintings and Polychromed Sculptures in the Copernicus University of Toruń. Instead of Beva 371 recommended by Berger, a water binder (50 per cent water emulsion of Osacryl with 4 per cent methylcellulose as 1 :2) was used giving a tight airproof coat on the back of the plyed-up painting, which made it possible to produce underpressure between the back of the painting and the top of the table. In this lies a difference between that method and a traditional one; moreover, it permits for the plying-up without covering the whole facing of the painting with foil. An additional advantage of the described technique is the possibility to dry up the painting completely during the treatment under a continuous effect of underpressure and increased temperature, which reduces greatly a risk involved in every traditional plying-up on a water binder. This offers also a possiblity to avoid numerous inconveniences of drying the painting with tissue paper under high pressure. The method has been employed in practice to ply up the 18 th-century picture of „Madonna with the Child” .
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