Lamentation, Releaded

Lead creeps. It is a soft metal holding up a heavy, brittle one, and over about a hundred and twenty years it stops being able to. The panel had been releaded once, probably in the 1890s, and by 2019 it had bowed sixty-two millimetres out of plane at the centre — far enough that from the aisle you could see it was no longer flat.

A bowed panel cannot be pushed back. Push it and the glass goes, because the lead is now the only thing that will move and the glass is what will break. It has to be taken down, dismantled, and rebuilt. Nine months, most of it waiting.

Not repainting panel 3

About forty per cent of the trace on panel 3 has gone. This is a legible loss — the figures are still readable — and there was pressure from the parish to make it good. We did not. Repainting a fifteenth-century panel produces a twenty-first-century panel with old glass in it. What we did instead was photograph the whole panel in raking light before dismantling, which shows where the paint was as a slight matt shadow, and that record is now in the diocesan archive along with our report.

Cement

The cement that goes under the leaves of the came is whiting, plaster, linseed oil, turpentine and lamp black, mixed on the bench to the consistency of thin cream and brushed in from both faces. Then whiting is dusted over and brushed off, which takes the oil out of the surface. It is a filthy two days and there is no substitute for it. A panel that has not been cemented properly is not weatherproof and will rattle in a gale.