Original subtitles

The angel Gabriel has descended from heaven.

He brings momentous news.

On his iridescent wings,

the angel has come to earth to tell Mary

that she has been chosen to be the mother of the Son of God

in human form.

I think the first thing that strikes you

is the intensity of this moment.

You're very aware of the fact that there are these two figures

astonishingly close to each other.

There's a kind of intimacy about it.

It's an intensely private moment.

The Annunciation was painted nearly 600 years ago

by the Flemish artist Jan van Eyck,

and it has led a rich and, at times, a dangerous life.

In the 19th century, it went under the saw and chisel

in a hazardous operation.

And 75 years ago,

the painting was sneaked out of Russia

to be delivered into the hands of an American multimillionaire,

who then hid the painting away in a cellar.

In modern times,

the Annunciation has been studied with intense scrutiny,

as scholars seek to unearth the secrets of the painting.

Van Eyck's an extraordinary artist,

and there were moments when I was looking closely at the painting

and your heart stops when you look at some of these moments

of extraordinary beauty.

I'm in awe of him as a painter.

I'm in awe of this supreme technical ability that he had,

which was just breathtaking.

If you look, there was these wonderful technicolour wings

that are flapping out behind him.

This is an astonishing tour de force.

The man who created the Annunciation loved to paint in codes,

and he may have worked as a spy as well as an artist.

To modernize, this is a mysterious image,

full of half-concealed messages.

The Annunciation is one of the most intriguing paintings of Western art,

and it has one big message.

It heralds the arrival of a new idea that was to change the world.

Today, the Annunciation hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

It's an oil painting, just over three feet high

and about 13 inches wide.

Its tall, narrow shape suggests that it wasn't painted to stand alone,

but originally was just one panel in a small altarpiece

made for a rich patron.

In the painting, a baby-faced angel Gabriel,

dressed in an elaborately decorated cope

and holding a crystal sceptre, points towards heaven.

He smiles and greets Mary.

Mary, disturbed from her reading,

raises her hands in acknowledgment of his message from God.

Beside her, a vase of lilies symbolizes her purity.

Above Mary, the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove,

descends on a golden ray of divine light.

Jesus Christ is about to be conceived,

and Mary's face reflects the conflicts of this sudden, unique moment.

Here is this figure of Mary.

She's being told that she's going to become the Mother of God,

and quite understandably,

she is full of mixed, confused reactions.

It's summed up, I think, most clearly in her hands,

which are raised up in the way that you would

if you're suddenly told something quite incredible,

but at the same time there's something worshipful about those hands.

So it's a very profound ambiguity there, I think.

She is probably afraid, but she also knows she has to say yes.

There's a slight surprise,

because I'm sure she didn't expect to see the angel,

and there's no fear, but there is a kind of,

may God's will be done.

It's a very human response to being pregnant.

I feel pulled into the painting, you know,

that it pulls you into it.

You can see that it's a painting,

but at the same time you almost want to touch it

to see if it's really velvet or not.

So that's an extraordinary painting, very talented.

The Annunciation is one of the great feast days

in the Christian calendar.

It's celebrated on the 25th of March,

an appropriate nine months before Christmas.

The moment is told in the Gospel of St. Luke.

And the angel said unto her,

Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.

And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb,

and bring forth a son, and shall call his name Jesus.

The Annunciation is one of the pivotal moments in Christianity.

It is the moment at which the incarnation takes place,

that is, in which Christ becomes human,

so it in effect is the beginning of a great cycle,

which ends with his death and with his resurrection,

and is therefore one of the most popular subjects in Western art.

There was a long tradition of depicting the Annunciation.

Jan van Eyck would have been aware of how other artists

had presented the scene.

Italian artists frequently set the Annunciation in cloisters,

as in Fra Angelico's interpretation,

with Gabriel swooping down on the unsuspecting Mary.

In Northern Europe, however, Gabriel's sudden arrival

was more likely to be set in an ordinary home,

as in this version by van Eyck's fellow Flemish artist, Robert Campin.

The story of van Eyck's Annunciation begins in the Belgian city of Bruges,

where it was painted around 1435,

when the artist was in his mid-forties.

Van Eyck, seen here in what's thought to be a self-portrait,

seems to show a politician's caginess, as well as the sharp eye of a draftsman.

Van Eyck's early life is a mystery,

and no paintings that he must have done as a young man have survived.

It was in Bruges that he established himself

as one of the major artists of the age.

He held the prestigious position of court painter

to the powerful Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy.

Philip held van Eyck in high esteem, and not only as an artist.

The Duke also sent him on missions that are still unexplained.

These secret and distant journeys are fairly mysterious.

We don't know what he was doing on them,

but we do know that he's paid highly for doing them,

that the fact that they are distant,

the potential then is he could have been going as far as Jerusalem.

Who knows? Philip is interested in another crusade.

It's very possible that Jan van Eyck was mapping territories for him

with the purpose of some sort of political manoeuvring.

After all, he's an artist, he can draw.

Whether Philip valued van Eyck chiefly for art or for espionage,

the artist commanded an unusually high social standing in Bruges.

One would picture him as a, you know, as a renowned figure.

And if you look at the supposed self-portrait of the man with the red turban,

and if you look at the portrait of his wife, Margaret van Eyck,

then we have a sense of the elevated status

that the artist and his wife must have enjoyed at this period.

It was in his early 40s that van Eyck painted some of the masterpieces

of the Northern Renaissance, including the Annunciation.

In scale, the most imposing of them was a work in the cathedral in Ghent.

It's the huge, spectacular Ghent altarpiece.

He created the work with his brother Hubert,

but in it we see many of the touches that Jan van Eyck was to include in the Annunciation.

And on the outer folding panels, he painted an Annunciation scene.

The Ghent altarpiece is the first dated painting that we have by Jan van Eyck.

In one sense, it is where van Eyck's career begins,

which is very odd because, of course, it's the largest altarpiece made

in the 15th century in Northern Europe,

and it obviously isn't made by a beginner,

and yet we have nothing, no documents, no dating,

for paintings before that time.

A year or two later, van Eyck painted perhaps his most recognisable image,

nowadays known as the Arnolfini portrait,

an enigmatic depiction of a rich Italian merchant and his wife,

with their little dog.

It's a painting better known for questions than for answers.

Is the young woman pregnant or just wearing a fashionable gown?

Is this a wedding?

Shoes often symbolised such an occasion.

The orange, a luxury then, seems to confirm the couple's wealth.

The mirror on the back wall, studded with the stations of the cross,

suggests the eye of God overlooking the couple.

Van Eyck was not a man who painted simple pictures,

and like the Arnolfini portrait, the Annunciation too is full of coded messages and symbols.

They begin in a message of tenderness, key to the painting's purpose,

as Gabriel approaches Mary.

It is a surprise when you look at it to realise quite how close together these figures are.

If you look at the angel's left leg,

it's pushing forward towards Mary's body in an almost invasive way.

You get the feeling that Mary, if she was so inclined, might even object.

But, in fact, that feeling is dispelled when we look at the angel's face

and we realise how beautiful it is, how peaceful it is.

There's nothing threatening, actually, about him at all.

And the painting adds a flourish to the poignancy of the moment

by inscribing Gabriel's gentle words of greeting to Mary,

Ave gratia plena,

Hail full of grace.

Mary replies,

Ecce ancila domini,

Behold the handmaiden of the Lord.

And most considerately, her words are painted upside down and back to front,

so that God may read them more easily from his heavenly vantage point.

The words are important.

They evoke a God of love, rather than a stern God of judgement.

Unlike his contemporaries, van Eyck placed his Annunciation in a church,

and there seems to be one overriding theme.

Everything is geared towards celebrating a particular victory.

The painting has coded messages about the old faith.

And the new one.

First of all, when you look at the painting,

you're surprised that there is this very elaborate church,

and you think, well, what's he trying to do here?

But once your eye starts travelling over this church,

you realise that he's telling you all kinds of things

about the larger meaning of the event that's taking place.

You know, there are three windows,

starting at the top, where God is isolated in a window,

very much on his own, according to the old Jewish belief that there was one God.

And then gradually, as you move down, you realise that the solitary God idea

is being replaced by the Christian trinity.

There are three windows, and they have to be symbolic of this triple identity that God now assumes.

God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.

Throughout, the painting is packed with pointed references to the old scriptures

and the triumph of the new faith, Christianity.

Wall paintings show the baby Moses handed to Pharaoh's daughter,

and Moses receiving the Ten Commandments.

And the figures stand on floor tiles with signs of the zodiac,

signifying God's dominion over the planets.

There are also images from the Old Testament

that prefigure Jesus' life and fate.

Tucked away in the corner is an image of Absalom hanging by his hair from a tree,

a prophecy of Christ's eventual crucifixion.

In this painting, the Virgin Mary and the angel Gabriel

are surrounded by a large series, both on the floor and little roundels on the back wall,

of illustrations from the Old Testament, from Samson, from the life of David,

all of which were taken by Christian theologians in the Middle Ages

as predictions for various events in the life of Christ.

So that, in a sense, the painting is showing the foundation,

the sort of origins in the Old Testament, an earlier dispensation

for what's going to follow after this, the defining moment in Christianity.

Even the way van Eyck went about the practical business of painting

was tied into his purpose of celebrating Christianity's triumphant arrival.

The Annunciation was painted on a panel of oak,

prepared with a ground layer of chalk and glue just half a millimetre thick.

To smooth it down, van Eyck would have used the stems of that pernicious garden weed,

mare's tail, a medieval version of sandpaper.

On the finished surface, artists could then draw out their composition in ink.

But whereas broad outlines sufficed for many, van Eyck's temperament demanded more.

In recent years, just what he drew on the ground layer has been scientifically brought to light.

Using a technique called infrared reflectography,

in which infrared light passes through the layers of paint,

images that hadn't been seen for more than five centuries were revealed.

We discovered a fantastic, detailed, finely hatched, very carefully worked up underdrawing.

The artist never dreamed we would be able to see these sketches.

It's an absolutely staggering underdrawing.

It has every nuance of light and shade,

every fold of the drapery with indications for which folds are deeper

and which ones are lighter.

So it's a complete guide for what will happen in the painting.

The underdrawing shows just how the composition of the Annunciation was planned and developed.

Though they are major features of the painting,

the lilies do not appear in the underdrawing,

and neither does the holy dove.

In other areas, especially the key figure of Gabriel,

there are subtle alterations.

He fusses around, as it were, with the positions of the hands and the eyes of the figures.

Here in Gabriel's finger, you can see that the drawing,

he originally had Gabriel's finger pointing toward the Virgin,

but in the paint surface, he's moved the finger so that it's more of a beckoning gesture.

And in this very tight detail of Gabriel's head, you can see the iris and the eye pupil all in the underdrawing,

and then Van Eyck paints the entire eye just a fraction of an inch higher,

and it's even moved on the other side,

which just goes to show the incredible care he took to get the tilt of the head and the gaze of the eye in exactly the right direction.

Whoever commissioned the Annunciation seems to have had little worry about how much it would cost.

Expensive pigments were used, especially the ultramarine of Mary's robe,

made from the very costly mineral lapis lazuli.

The brutality of the mixing process gives way to the delicacy of the imitation of real cloth.

But significantly, it's Gabriel, the messenger heralding the coming of the new religion,

who gets the fullest treatment.

Mary remains a comparatively monochrome figure,

but on Gabriel, Van Eyck lavishes all his virtuosity.

The way he paints the fabric of the archangel's garments is a study in itself.

Here what we're looking at is the area on Gabriel's leg,

and the way Van Eyck created this was first to lay down a simple base tone in brown,

and then to use a yellow pigment to create the effect of the gold threads.

He first laid down a streak of this yellow paint,

and he used his brush spread out so that individual hairs create little flickering sparks of light.

The effect is of a gold element in the brocade,

but also a flickering light catching on individual threads within the brocade.

While that paint was still wet, he returned with black paint and drew this grid pattern through the wet paint,

creating a range of colours, from the deepest blacks, to the highlight of the yellow,

to these mid-tones where his brush dragged through the wet yellow paint.

Gabriel's robe seems so real.

And so does the church, and the footstool, and the tiles on the floor.

It's easy to imagine that to create the painting, Van Eyck simply drew and painted from life.

We are caught up in the idea that what he is painting is real.

These look like real objects, and indeed they are painted with such skill that we feel we can touch them.

We feel that this is something that did actually exist.

But what we need to remember with Van Eyck is that he is such a master of illusion,

and such a clever painter, that what he is doing is inventing his own reality.

And it's a contrivance, but a brilliant one.

Nothing in the Annunciation seems more real than the fabric of Gabriel's elaborately woven cope.

But it's not real. It is imagined.

The painter studied what he observed around him, and then adapted it for his own purposes.

The fabric that Gabriel wears in the Annunciation was probably never real.

Van Eyck has taken motifs from real textiles,

and he knows the weave of real textiles so well that he's able to recompose them to suit his painting.

For example, this piece of fabric is part of a priest's vestment,

probably made around the same time as the Annunciation in the 1430s.

And like the cope, it's dominated by a central dianthus flower,

an enormous, ragged carnation flower.

And you can see that the crimson pile of the velvet is woven in two heights,

and you can see the same effect captured on Gabriel's cope.

The cope is not just a flamboyant piece of oil painting.

As we might expect from Van Eyck, it also contains yet another coded message.

This large dianthus flower was said to be the flower of God,

and so it is a representation of Christ himself,

and so was very appropriate for the Annunciation.

The painting also harnesses light in the name of Christianity.

Gabriel, once again, is at the centre of it.

The light in Van Eyck's Annunciation is something which is palpable.

It suffuses the entire picture.

You are aware of how the light illuminates the Virgin's figure

and illuminates the face and body of Gabriel.

And one of the remarkable visual experiences is to look at the crystal and metal scepter that he holds,

and the way in which light refracts within that crystal.

And also the morse, the jeweled object that he is wearing,

where there are pearls and jewels and metal,

all of which have different qualities of light which interact and reflect off each other.

You are able to sort of look almost into the depths of the gems themselves.

You have the ever-changing colour scheme of the wings of the archangel,

you know, where the whole palette is present and is conveyed,

with a great sense of lighting in a perfectly lit environment.

In the Annunciation, however, there is one place where the picture abandons the paintbrush

to show light in a very different way.

For the rays of divine light coming from God, mere paint wasn't good enough.

Van Eyck uses real gold to create a radiant glow around the dove,

the symbol of the Holy Spirit.

When the Annunciation was completed,

its Christian message and the skill of its execution must have made a deep impression.

But just five years after he put the finishing touches to the painting,

Jan van Eyck died.

He was in his early 50s.

In Bruges, he was given a grand funeral,

and bells rang out to celebrate his life.

He was buried in a church that has long since gone,

and today no trace remains of his last resting place.

It's a sad thought that his bones may lie somewhere beneath the Crowne Plaza Hotel,

in the centre of the city.

But what happened to the painting afterwards is a mystery.

No one knows for sure where it was for nearly 400 years.

And then, in the early 19th century,

it suddenly turned up in Paris,

and was knocked down at auction to the King of the Netherlands.

To the north and the north and the north and the mountains.

Willem II was a flamboyant character who enjoyed high living.

He ran up huge debts, collecting art.

That meant the end of the Annunciation's brief stay

in the Dutch Royal Collection.

When Willem died, an auction was held to settle his debts.

keeping things in the family

his brother-in-law, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia

one of the creditors

moved in and acquired the Annunciation

for 5,375 guilders

nearly 23,000 pounds in today's money

the Annunciation was on its way to Russia

its new home was the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg

where the royal family lived and held court

taking its place in the imperial collection

the little painting was later put on show

in Russia's first public museum

the new Hermitage

but the Annunciation did not settle down to a quiet life

it was given an extensive restoration

and to protect it from the very hot summers

and bitterly cold winters in St. Petersburg

an operation was carried out

that seriously jeopardised the whole existence of the painting

in what seems a reckless move

the Russians decided to lift the painting off

its 400-year-old wood panel

and transfer it to canvas

the climate in St. Petersburg

was and is very changeable

it goes from extremes of cold to warm

and wooden panels just don't survive

unless you've got air conditioning

so they decided

rather than having these panels split

and warp and flake

that the best thing to do

was to transfer them

from their original wooden support to canvas

in this era of electronic climate control in galleries

such an undertaking wouldn't be considered for a second

this is what they would have done to the Annunciation

the first part of the process is to secure the paint layer

with tissue paper

and the tissue paper is stuck on with sturgeon glue

sturgeon glue is made out of the swim bladder of the sturgeon fish

that's the fish out of which caviar is taken

we apply several layers of this tissue paper

which become quite hard

so it holds the paint layer together

with the fragile paint layer firmly supported

the long and hazardous process of removing the wood can begin

at the Hermitage there was a family the Sidorovs who did this work

one of them must have transferred the Annunciation

the main craftsmen who undertook the transfers were called Sidorov

they were four brothers

and they came to the Hermitage as carpenters

they were trained to do this wonderful tricky transfer work

and they undertook hundreds of these transfers

as the last fibers of the wood panel are scraped away

one slip of the blade can result in permanent damage to the paint layer

by now less than a millimeter away

removing the last wood fibers

is the moment when you can really do a lot of damage to the painting

the secret of this is to take your time and to have peace of mind

you can't do it in a hurry

after many days of sawing, chiseling and scraping

the moment of transferal to canvas approaches

and at this point, scarcely believably

the Annunciation shared the fate of an iron-on badge

or sticker

I think what I'm doing now is pretty similar to what they did to the Annunciation

in terms of sticking it on its new support

they would heat the iron on a stove

it wants to be just above hand warm

150 years ago, when the Annunciation underwent this terrifying procedure

there was no such thing as thermostatic control

the Sidorovs simply had to use their experience

in choosing the right moment to apply their heavy, hot iron

judging the right temperature to activate the glue

and stick the painting firmly to the canvas

the transfer process comes to an end

when the layers of tissue paper are carefully removed from the painting

and the canvas is stretched onto a new frame

sadly, the Annunciation was not one of the better transfers

carried out at the Hermitage

the Sidorov brothers often signed their transfer work

there's no signature on the Annunciation

in the case of the Annunciation

the transfer really wasn't that good

the main problem is that the weave of the canvas

that was used as a new support for the painting

has been pressed into the surface of the paint

it was pressed in by the pressure

from this very heavy iron

which had been heated

and if you get down and you look across the surface

you'll see this very strong

nubbly texture of the canvas

on a painting that should have had this jewel-like surface

in its new form

with a loss of gloss

the Annunciation was returned to the walls of the Hermitage

still a jewel among the thousands of works of art

in the Imperial Collection

and then in 1917

came the cataclysmic event that was to overthrow the old aristocratic order

and have an unexpected outcome for the Annunciation

the Russian Revolution

in the late 1920s

the new Moscow government under the leadership of Yosef Stalin

stood in desperate need of hard currency

to finance the modernization of Soviet industry

to help raise money

the order was given to sell many works in the Hermitage

to foreign collectors

things did happen

there was a tragedy

it was a crime because

no government has a right

to sell objects of art and cultural heritage

cultural heritage

is the most important thing

and the only important thing the nations have

it's what makes

people different from the animals

it's what makes a nation different from another nation

news of the impending sell-off

soon reached the ears of one of the richest

and most powerful men in America

Andrew Mellon was not just a businessman

and an art collector

but also the United States Secretary of the Treasury

Andrew Mellon was a very strange man

he belonged to a group of rich American businessmen

some people thought gangsters crooks

others thought immensely talented entrepreneurs

who transformed the American economy

in the late 19th and early 20th century

into the greatest industrial powerhouse in the world

and the watchword of his life really

was acquisition and accumulation

and he spent the first half of his life

acquiring and accumulating companies

and arguably he spent the later part of his life

acquiring and accumulating pictures

Mellon was eager to acquire some of the Hermitage paintings

with the annunciation high on his shopping list

his art dealer Charles Henschel opened negotiations

but the Russians were reluctant to part with Van Eyck's masterpiece

and so at the end of May 1930

Henschel set out across the Atlantic

to meet the Russians face to face

but well before he reached Europe

the telephone rang in Henschel's cabin

in one of the earliest ship to shore conversations

Henschel learnt to his great surprise

that the Russians had suddenly agreed a price for the annunciation

he wasted no time in contacting Andrew Mellon

who agreed immediately to buy the picture

in Russia things were moving fast

on the morning of the 3rd of June 1930

the director of the Hermitage received by telegram

an instruction from Soviet bureaucrats in Moscow

but it contained an exploitable error

hand over Van Dyck's Annunciation to Antiquariat's jurisdiction

it read

the Hermitage curators

desperate to hang on to their masterpiece

seized on the mistake

and denied that they had such a painting

as the Annunciation by Van Dyck

a good try

but it failed

another Moscow telegram soon arrived

testily clearing up the confusion

I confirmed that the discussion

evidently relates to the well-known painting

by Van Dyck

and not Van Dyck

the game was up

the director of the Hermitage

helpless to resist

it was that time when

saying no to the government was impossible

from two points of view

one

well it was a rather cruel system

political system

you say no

and you always risk your

not only your career

maybe your life

and your freedom

another thing was

that

the idea of state property

was very strong

and

there was really no legal way

of saying no

the last person

to see the Annunciation

hanging on the walls

of the Hermitage

was Tatjana Chernavena

one of the museum's curators

she was ordered to stay behind

when the doors closed

at six o'clock

to take down the painting

and to hand it over later

that evening

to a representative

of the people's commissariat

for foreign affairs

she was also instructed

to rearrange the remaining pictures

so that visitors

the next day

wouldn't notice

that the Annunciation

had gone

when the government

is selling

objects of art

it means the government

doesn't care

about culture

about the museums

and this is very important

when your government

doesn't care about culture

it means

that things

are going bad

The 3rd of June 1930

remains to this day

a sad moment

for the guardians

of the Hermitage's

great collection

very much against

their own wishes

they had lost

a masterpiece of Western art

and to make matters worse

the only painting

by Jan van Eyck

in their care

a few days later

the Annunciation was in Berlin

on the first stage

of its journey

to America

such was the importance

of the painting

that it was delivered

to the German capital

by the head of the Soviet

antiquariat himself

and handed over

to Charles Henschel

at the city's customs house

ever the astute businessman

Andrew Mellon

had got the Annunciation

for a bargain basement

price of £100,000

the equivalent of

£3.5 million

in today's money

the Annunciation

sailed away

to the new world

having gone to all this trouble

to get his hands

on the Annunciation

Andrew Mellon

and didn't proudly show it off

instead

he locked it away

out of sight

in the basement

of the Corcoran gallery

not far from his

Washington home

and when he was asked

about it

and the 20 other pictures

that he'd bought

from the Hermitage

he denied

that he owned them

not least

because

as Secretary of State

for the Treasury

he couldn't be seen

to be dealing

with a country

that the United States

didn't officially recognise

and there was another reason

much closer to home

In 1930-31

when Mellon's buying

these Hermitage pictures

America is going

through catastrophic

economic meltdown

and for Mellon

to be seen

to be spending

millions of dollars

on these works of art

when many people

were almost literally

starving to death

would have looked

so bad

that even Mellon

thought that wouldn't

be a good idea

but the cat was soon

let out of the bag

in the most dramatic way

in 1935

Andrew Mellon

was prosecuted

by the Democratic

administration

of President Franklin D. Roosevelt

on charges

of tax evasion

at the very centre

of the investigation

was his secret

hoard of masterpieces

during the trial

a witness in Mellon's defence

the maverick British art dealer

Sir Joseph Devine

confirmed the importance

of the annunciation

that one picture

he said

would make any collector

famous

and then amid the hurly-burly

of the trial

Andrew Mellon

made an extraordinary

and totally unexpected

offer

to the American people

At the tax trial

Mellon is compelled

to say

that he has this great scheme

to found a gallery

in Washington

and it's also

at the tax trial

that he's compelled

to say

that the nucleus

of this great gallery

will indeed be

these astonishing pictures

that he's bought from Russia

It's only

when he's on the stand

that he's forced

to say

I am collecting pictures

I am putting money aside

to create

one of the great galleries

of the world

for the American people

here in Washington

On the 17th of March 1941

the National Gallery of Art

in Washington

was inaugurated

by Mellon's old

political enemy

President Roosevelt

It is with a very real

sense of satisfaction

that I accept

for the people

of the United States

and on their behalf

this National Gallery

and the collections

it contains

Building the National Gallery

of Art

cost Andrew Mellon

the equivalent

of well over

100 million pounds

in today's money

and in all

he donated

132 works of art

One of the star pictures

in this great

new American collection

was

and remains

the Annunciation

Since the painting

arrived in Washington

over 60 years ago

incalculably more

has been learnt about it

than in the previous

500 years

Every new development

in modern technology

has been brought to bear

on the inner life

of van Eyck's work

In the early 1990s

a rigorous program

of analysis

cleaning

and restoration

was carried out

and not before time

The surface condition

of the painting

had deteriorated

so much

that it was becoming

impossible

to appreciate

the beauty

of the image

The Annunciation

is part of the original

bequest

to the National Gallery

of Art

and as far as we know

it had never been

restored

from 1941

until like 1991

or 92

and it had accumulated

not only dirt

but also the varnish

had yellowed

and it was

at a point

where every year

it got worse

and worse

The decision was made

to carry out

a restoration

and the first obvious

job that had to be done

was to remove

the dirty yellow varnish

Once the varnish

had been removed

it was then

possible

the restoration

that had been done

in the Hermitage

in 1864

The entire

garment

of the Virgin

had been totally

repainted

By contrast

the figure

of the Archangel Gabriel

was in sparkling

condition

absolutely breathtaking

condition

compared

with this

rather gross

heavy

dull

dirty

pale blue

repaint

of the Virgin's garment

As David Bulb

began to remove

the dull Russian

overpainting

the brilliance

of van Eyck's

costly ultramarine

gradually began

to shine through

but as the work

progressed

serious

paint losses

were revealed

throughout the picture

Most tragically

van Eyck's

top layer

of paint

on Mary's robe

the glaze

defining all the folds

and shadows

had gone

If David Bull's

restoration was to be

faithful to the original

then it was essential

to find a sample

of this missing layer

A few grains of paint

were taken from

the Annunciation

and examined

under a high-powered

microscope

of the Virgin's robe

We were looking for evidence

of the missing

van Eyck's blue glaze

and it was not

we couldn't find it

anywhere

on the blue robe

then it occurred to me

that it might survive

in one spot

and that's where the paint

of the Virgin's hair

protects the blue paint

of the Virgin's robe below

and by incredible luck

there was one single paint loss

in the Virgin's hair

and I was able to take a sample

from the very edge

of this loss

and here we see

the paint cross section

we took from that area

of loss

which shows you

from the side

all the layers of the painting

and so this is the upper surface

of the painting

this is the lower surface

and in this one area

we found that third layer

a pure ultramarine

glaze layer

a transparent

deep blue glaze

Further analysis showed

that this top layer

was not oil paint

but water-based

its loss suggested

that it was washed away

when the tissue paper

was removed

during the Russian transfer

process a hundred years earlier

They would have probably

used the warm water

to soften the glue

and wash off

the different layers of paper

so in washing off

the animal glue

they also washed away

the glazes

This was maybe

the worst tragedy

of the transfer

in losing those glazes

As he set about

recreating

the missing parts

of the Annunciation

David Bull

had one invaluable

source of reference

Van Eyck's

meticulous under drawing

Without that

I would have had

to invent

Van Eyck's glazes

which would have

been totally wrong

and it was just a matter

of putting one glaze

after another

to slowly build up

to what I thought

was the amount

of depth of colour

and definition

that Van Eyck

would have achieved

on this painting

All great artworks

have stories to tell

The Annunciation

but not many are as strange

and colourful as this one

For the first four centuries

of its life

the Annunciation

served the worship

of God

for those who prayed

before it

For its next two centuries

the painting

hanging on gallery walls

has been an object

of worship

in itself

In both roles

it can only have succeeded

supremely

in the Annunciation

we can see

the two aspects

of Van Eyck's brilliance

coming together

the brilliance

of his technique

and the brilliance

of his mind

where he's thinking

through a work

as he's actually creating it

and bringing a depth

of meaning into it

which is extraordinary

Even if you were

a 15th century viewer

you might still

have had a problem

trying to imagine

what this extraordinary

event actually

did look like

and then suddenly

Van Eyck

brings you up short

with a painting

that makes it look

so completely

beyond any sort

of doubt

whatsoever

that it would win you

over, wouldn't it?