The Walters Art Museum is home to the third-oldest conservation lab in the United States. For nearly a century, the museum has been dedicated to protecting and preserving one of America’s most distinctive art collections; caring for the books, paintings, statues, and various objects for future generations of Walters visitors is critical work.

The Walters Day of Giving was established in 2022 to commemorate the opening of the Walters Art Museum in 1934 and to bring together art lovers of all ages to support the conservation of an artwork currently in the lab.

This year, on the second annual Walters Day of Giving, your donation will go toward the conservation of The Archangel Gabriel by Luca Signorelli, one of the leading Italian painters of the Renaissance. The total cost to conserve this work is $38,000. In one day, our goal is to raise $18,000 toward conservation expenses. A gift of $28 will restore 1 square inch of this painting.

Do you have a question for our conservation team? The Walters Day of Giving falls on the same day as #AskAConservatorDay! To celebrate, we'll be answering your conservation questions live on YouTube on Friday, November 3 from the Conservation Window. Click here to leave a question for our conservators.

More about The Archangel Gabriel from Pamela Betts, Senior Paintings Conservator:

The Archangel Gabriel is a fragment taken from a much larger painting of the Annunciation, as told in the Gospel of Luke, that has long been on view in the Walters Art Museum’s Renaissance & Baroque Art galleries. Dated to 1490, this painting depicts Gabriel the archangel holding a white lily that is symbolic of the Virgin Mary’s purity. According to Joaneath Spicer, James A. Murnaghan Curator of Renaissance and Baroque Art at the Walters, the subject’s perfectly regular profile, the long curling hair, the gracefulness of the hands, and the overall emphasis on contour lines are characteristic of late 15th-century Central Italian painting, of which Signorelli was one of the great masters.

A separate painting of Mary, now residing in a private collection, is believed to originally be part of this larger painting, although it is not known when or why the larger version was altered. While the original location of the full painting is unknown, this fragment of Gabriel came into collections in Cologne and Philadelphia in the 19th century before being acquired by Henry Walters sometime before 1922.

Painted oil on a poplar panel, the work has been on permanent view and, until recently, it had never undergone conservation treatment at the Walters due to the degree of suspected damage. First noted in a 1936 record in the conservation files, the painting was found to have a “considerable number of repairs needed, involving too much labor for restoration at this time.”

When The Archangel Gabriel returned to the conservation lab recently, it was determined that the work had not been cleaned of layers of restoration in over a century. It was found to have numerous losses to paint layers that were covered by darkened restoration oil paint and which extended beyond the areas of paint loss. This restoration, added sometime before it came into the Walters collection, was concealed under layers of noticeably dark yellowed varnish. Your Day of Giving contribution will allow us to finally execute the repairs The Archangel Gabriel has long needed. After taking care to clean the previous restoration layers, we’ll fill the losses to paint layers in with a gesso putty and in-paint necessary areas with reversible conservation-grade materials.

About the painter:

Luca Signorelli was born in the hill town of Cortona in Southern Tuscany around 1450 and worked in central Italy, creating works in both fresco and oil. He trained as an apprentice of Pierro della Francesco in Arezzo where he developed knowledge and specialized skills for perspective, foreshortening of forms, and placement of figures in space. Signorelli, it is believed, was from a family of painters, none of whom had achieved other than minor local success. Signorelli, however, achieved great success, even purportedly receiving high praise from his contemporary Michaelangelo Buonarroti. He would count princes, popes, religious orders, and official bodies of government among his patrons. His achievements led to his invitation to complete two frescos in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. His fresco cycles in the Orvieto Cathedral are considered his greatest work.

Walters Day of Giving 2023

By The Walters Art Museum

Walters Day of Giving 2023

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