Graeme Gardiner's work on Knole's 17th century pedigree rolls

“This is interesting; now talking to the people at the College of Arms, they are unaware of many pedigrees that are more than one skin wide because it becomes so much more involved.  Why make something that’s more than one skin wide when it just becomes so much more complicated? So this is sort of a skin and a half.

The problem that having one-and-a-half-skin wide is: parchment expands and contracts, much more than paper.  And when you attach one skin of parchment to another, as has happened here: head to tail, head to tail, and side to side, each skin reacts on its own to what’s going on in the environment.  So just because you’ve attached 10 skins together, it doesn’t mean they will work together. You’ve basically got 10 little pockets, or big pockets, of expansion and contraction. 

And where they expand and contract, they’re either going to pull at each other and pull the adhesive apart, which hasn’t happened.  Or they’re going to pull at each other and create this very extreme cockling and undulation.  Now if you then add another half-skin, and alternate that, you’ve got even more pressures, which is why this looks like a rough North Sea on a bad day. And there’s nothing that we can do about that.  We can’t contain that.”

“The use of lead white as the white pigment comes with a sting in the tail. Because lead white is a beautiful colour.  It’s a very clean white.  It’s very opaque.  It’s a good mixer.  It holds its own when compared to vermilion and cinnabar, and the other medieval colours.  But it turns black with time – which is a bit of a catastrophe, if you think that all the white bits of a painting become black. 

They’ve not had the protection that a manuscript would provide.  Clearly, they’ve been rolled up.  And that rolling has provided a certain amount of protection.  You’ll see it provided an incredible amount of protection for the silver that’s been used extensively as a colour. And the larger pedigree in particular, at the end of the roll which clearly isn’t exposed very much,  the silver is virtually untouched by tarnish.  And I’ve never seen that before.  That is a first for me.  And when we unrolled it, for a first occasion.  That was the – for me, the ‘big reveal’.

And all of this, for me is just enhanced:  the gold paint, clearly it’s the gold pigment that’s used extensively and the silver as well.  Seeing the silver and the gold work together is quite remarkable.  And for me, it’s a one-off, I’ve never seen it like this before.  Not that I’ve worked on many of these things.  But where I’ve worked on manuscripts or illuminated books, it’s unusual to see.