"It was miraculous": The moment when conservators found John the Baptist in Shakespeare's Schoolroom

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

Leading Art Conservator Mark Perry on finding a new figure in a rare medieval wall painting at Shakespeare’s Schoolroom and Guildhall in Stratford-upon-Avon

A photo of a medieval wall painting of John the Baptist found at Shakespeare's Schoolroom and Guildhall

The scheme is a Trinity painting © SS&G

“We first got involved in about 2008. There’d been a previous investigation in about 2004 – they did a survey and cleaning tests but it fizzled out. We were approached to do a survey updating that, but that also fizzled out.

It’s been gradually revived to tie in with the Shakespeare anniversary, gathering momentum within the last couple of years. We’ve been advising as they’ve gone along. We certainly didn’t expect that the figures we found would be there – it happened as the process went along.

We knew that there was painting on the timbers. From our previous test areas we’d found the hand of Christ and the arm of god and so on. All the figures seemed to be just on the plain plaster panels. They were just silhouettes of very, very fragmentary figures.

A photo of a medieval painting of John the Baptist found at Shakespeare's Schoolroom

John the Baptist is shown with a halo above his head holding a staff and book and cradling a small lamb© Courtesy SS&G

We thought if there was going to be anything on the timbers it would just be a decorative figure or something like that. We had no reason to think that there was a figure in that section at all.

We’d had permission from Historic England to uncover certain areas to just investigate what was there, but we hadn’t at all investigated the stuff that once had the John the Baptist figure on, simply because it was out of what we thought was going to be the main composition.

We thought we already had John the Baptist, the cross and the Virgin Mary, all the various components in attendance. There was no reason to think that a figure would be on the timber and that far over to the right. Apart from anything else it completely unbalanced the composition.

John the Baptist is depicted alongside God the Father, Christ the Son and the Holy Spirit© SS&G

It was miraculous. We were just going to do a very light surface clean because the red and yellow paint that was on top had its own kind of historical importance: it’s of late 16th, early 17th origins. You can’t just get rid of these decorative schemes, they have their own importance.

As I damped it down I saw what looked like it could have been a halo and an eye. That’s when we thought there might be something more interesting here. We showed the venue team this and said we thought it was worth investigating further.

They gave us permission to do another test area. This eye started peeping through and then I gradually went on and got the top half of the figure. We then had another hiatus while we got permission to do the rest of it, which everyone obviously wanted to do but involved removing some more of this later scheme.

The painting is thought to have been made some time between 1425 and 1450© SS&G

Luckily, we got permission in just enough time before the end of the contract. With our work, you might be able to take away panels or screens back to the studio, but this is part of the fabric, it’s actually on the stud, so it was treated in situ.

I personally have never uncovered anything as complete or exciting as this. It’s of such high quality. One of the really lovely things about this is that the face is complete, whereas with a lot of paintings that you find on rood screens the faces have been deliberately defaced during the Reformation.

They’re quite often scratched out: if not the eyes, then often the whole face. To find something so complete is incredibly important from an art historical point of view, not least because it’s the only figure we’ve got on that screen now.

From head to waist, the figure is approximately 40cm high and is situated on one of the timber uprights of the building's south gable© Courtesy SS&G

You get an impression of how the figures would have appeared. The plan is to put a big smart-glass panel in the space, like they have on Grand Designs bedrooms and things like that. You flick a switch and it goes opaque, projecting an image.

This will really inform the reconstruction that is being put together on the screen. It originally had John the Baptist in the wrong place, because we didn’t have any idea that this figure was there. We’ve uncovered various details that have completely changed the plan.

The idea is that the lights will dim and there’ll be holy music while the projection is made, so everyone can share the experience. It reduces the need to have lots of signage.

A photo of the medieval buildings of Shakespeare's Schoolroom in Stratford-upon-Avon

Shakespeare's Schoolroom and Guildhall have worked with Historic England and Dr Kate Giles, of York University, on the major restoration of the buildings© Courtesy SS&G

It takes an awful lot of work to understand what we’ve got, so this is an easy way for people to grab a hold of how it looked. It offers a form of physical protection and stops UV light getting in.

This discovery has national significance. I’ve been showing it to some friends and colleagues and they’re just bowled over. You really don’t find these things very often, completely from scratch. I didn’t want to leave work and I couldn’t wait to get back in the morning.”