Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie is preparing a careful, two-year restoration of Filippo Lippi’s 1459 painting The Adoration in the Forest after conservators discovered that an old varnish layer is damaging the surface rather than protecting it. The project, announced by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, is funded by the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung and the Schoof’schen Stiftung. The museum has not confirmed the exact budget, but said the treatment will cost between €100,000 and €500,000.
The tempera-on-panel work is one of the Gemäldegalerie’s most important Renaissance holdings. Lippi painted the Virgin and newborn Christ child not in a Bethlehem stable, but in a mountainous forest, a setting that gives the image an unusual quiet and a distinctly Florentine sophistication. The painting was originally created for the private chapel of Palazzo Medici, the banking family’s new palace in Florence, where it would have served as the focal point of a highly controlled devotional space.
Conservators only recently understood the extent of the problem. In 2023, when the work was being considered for reframing, Berlin’s team used a new high-performance stereo microscope and found that the varnish, probably applied in the 19th century, was not merely discolored. In some places, it was pulling the paint away from the panel. Anja Wolf, a conservator at the Gemäldegalerie, described the project as unusually demanding, saying the team must remove the varnish while also stabilizing and consolidating the paint layer with extreme precision.
The most affected passages include the Virgin’s blue cloak, her skin, and areas of gold leaf. Those details matter not only for preservation, but for interpretation. The chapel for which the painting was made was a richly decorated Medici space, with a fresco cycle by Benozzo Gozzoli, a pupil of Fra Angelico. The setting was also politically charged: Tim Parks has written that Cosimo de’ Medici used the chapel as a secret conference room.
The restoration may also clarify a technical question that has long interested scholars. Neville Rowley, the Gemäldegalerie’s curator for 14th- and 15th-century Italian painting and sculpture, sees Lippi as a transitional figure. In 1459, gold leaf was already relatively old-fashioned, yet Lippi was also an early advocate of oil paint. The treatment may show whether he used oil here alongside egg tempera.
The work is expected to emerge brighter, with stronger contrast between light and dark. That should make details such as the white flowers on the forest floor read more clearly, bringing the image closer to the visual logic of Lippi’s composition. The floral motif also anticipates the flowers at the base of Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera, a reminder of Lippi’s influence on the next generation. Botticelli was Lippi’s most celebrated pupil, and Filippino Lippi, the artist’s son, later became Botticelli’s pupil in turn.
A Quattrocento copy of The Adoration in the Woods still remains in the Palazzo Medici chapel. Once the Berlin restoration is complete, Rowley hopes to build another Florentine exhibition around the painting and the artistic dynasty it helped shape.
