Heaven's above

A SALISBURY company has been instrumental in the restoration of a priceless 16th century ceiling fresco by Italian painter Guido Reni.

The fresco was rescued from rolled-up neglect in a stable block and, over a period of months, restored painstakingly to former glory, ready to take its place as the ceiling centrepiece of the library at Kingston Lacy, near Wimborne.

The painting, The Separation Of Night And Day, has been part of the National Trust's Kingston Lacy property since 1841, when William John Bankes bought it for £600 and transported it to his Dorset home from the Palazzo Zani, in Italy.

It suffered considerable damage when it was detached from the palazzo ceiling and it was partly to protect it and partly to preserve the library ceiling, which was threatened by its sagging weight, that the Trust put the fresco into storage when it acquired the property in 1982.

As specialist painting conservators Alan Bush and Jonathan Berry, of Bush & Berry, set to work, what became increasingly clear was that Reni's original work had been almost completely masked by oil paint used in a previous restoration.

Complicated conservation work included lining the plaster fresco with double canvas, consolidating flaking paint, removing the over-painting and yellowed varnish and retouching paint losses.

While the painstaking work continued off-site, the library ceiling at Kingston Lacy was strengthened to take the painting's weight.

A series of metal rods were fitted to the ceiling, ready to clip onto fixing plates on the reverse of the fresco's stretcher.

Using a 1904 photograph of the library that appeared in Country Life magazine as a guide, Salisbury company CS Gallagher Ltd recreated timber mouldings to frame the painting.

They also created the Edwardian ceiling compartmentation and the decorative scheme in the library to mirror the way the library looked at the turn of the last century The company was also responsible for the scaffolding construction that made it possible to access the library on the first floor via the window and bring the fresco in that way.

"Can you imagine," says Kate Warren, National Trust collections manager at Kingston Lacy, "we had to roll it up, bring it through the window and then unroll it again."

That was only half the battle as the conservators then had to fix the unrolled fresco onto the stretcher before the entire project team helped with the lift from floor to ceiling.

"The minute the painting was secure everyone crawled underneath it, and we spent a happy half-an-hour lying on our backs admiring it," recalls Kate.

It's obvious the whole operation was enough to give her palpitations, but she is more than delighted with the result of the £90k project.

"It's exceeded all our expectations," she says enthusiastically.

"This extraordinary fresco, with its remarkable history, is one of the most significant paintings in our collection."

Certainly it is one of the largest ceiling frescos in the country.

Guido Reni (1575-1642) originally painted the fresco, which covers an area of just over four square metres, on a curved plaster ceiling in the Palazzo Zani, in Bologna, around 1600.

The painting is in a quadrofoil shape and depicts the figure of Dawn separating the figures of Night and Day.

In its new location, it is lit by extraordinary coiled carbon filament light bulbs that are, once again, faithful reproductions of those thought to be in the library originally, which Phillips, in the Netherlands, specially replicated for the project.

"There was a great debate in the project about whether we did the light bulbs," says Kate.

"This house had early electricity and this is what they would have looked like - they are beautiful objects in their own right."

Now the National Trust property is once again open to the public and Reni's original fresco painting will be seen by the public for the first time in 150 years.

"What we're most pleased about is that it is precisely 20 years since the National Trust opened Kingston Lacy to the public," says Kate.

"Visitors will come upstairs and this is the first room they see, and it's pure Kingston Lacy and William John Bankes through and through."