Gilding the Dollar Store Dolls

To create a 21st-century version of a 12th-century gilded altarpiece, you’ll need a few ingredients: gold leaf, bits of ceramic tile, a toy rhinoceros, and half a dozen dolls from the dollar store.

It may sound like a craft project, but this mock-up altarpiece served as a key step in building a dazzling presentation of an object on display in the new Getty exhibition Lumen: The Art and Science of Light.

Curators wanted to recreate the changing light that would have originally shone on a gilded altarpiece called the Stavelot Retable, commissioned for the Imperial Benedictine Abbey of Stavelot in Belgium. In the exhibition, visitors are shown how moving light across the surface of the golden relief sculpture would have affected the way 12th-century worshippers experienced the altarpiece. Beams of sun entering through windows during the day and flickering candlelight at night would have cast different shapes and “temperatures” of warm and cool light across the altarpiece, creating a sense of movement that animated the figures and enhanced a sense of divine presence.

Why didn’t the curators and designers just use the real altarpiece to plan this special lighting? It wouldn’t be arriving at Getty from the Musée de Cluny until just days before the exhibition opened—they had to figure out how to light the object without seeing it in person first. So, they put their creative skills to work building a clever recreation of the altarpiece. This mock-up allowed them to test different types of lighting and ultimately create a lighting design that emulates how the altarpiece may have looked in the abbey church.

“We wanted to encourage visitors to think about the ways in which works of art were experienced in their original environments, and the role of light in medieval spaces,” says Ben Allsopp, graduate intern in Getty’s manuscripts department. “Visitors might consider that the artificial, stable light of the contemporary museum is fundamentally different to the flickering candlelight or natural light of the medieval church.”

A stunning centerpiece

For medieval monks, pilgrims, and other visitors to the Benedictine Abbey, the shimmering gilded altarpiece decorated with enamel and gemstones would have been a magnificent focal point at all times of the day. Originally displayed on top of the abbey’s altar table, at the far edge, it provided a radiant backdrop for the performance of worship rituals. The altarpiece depicts the Pentecost (the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles), with rays of light shining on the 12 apostles below. As an unusual addition, it also includes Christ (who was not physically present at the Pentecost) as the source of the apostles’ divine inspiration. For visitors to Lumen, as the light changes and they move around the piece, the relief sculptural heads of Christ and the apostles also appear to move.

Getty curators were inspired by the work of Stanford art historian Bissera Pentcheva, whose work on the optical effects of the Stavelot altarpiece in its natural environment sparked the idea for the display. The Getty team also hired a lighting design firm that dove deep into Pentcheva’s scholarship on this object and worked with the curators, exhibition designers, and preparators to create a design strategy for the altarpiece. Then, Getty staff built a replica so the lighting designers could test the display while the real altarpiece remained in France, awaiting its trip to Los Angeles for the exhibition.

Building the (mock) altarpiece

First, Getty exhibition designer Alan Konishi cut a piece of foam core in the exact same shape and dimensions as the altarpiece (that’s 85 inches wide!). Then Alex Bispham, graduate intern for exhibitions, went to Michaels craft store and bought gold spray paint and wooden dowels. She glued the dowels on the foam core to represent pillars, and spray painted the entire thing gold.

Next, manuscripts curator Kristen Collins bought six dolls at a dollar store, and she, Bispham, and Allsopp carefully applied tissue-thin sheets of 24 karat gold over the dolls’ bodies.

“We would try and apply it in a very smooth way to the bodies with minimal creases, but it often ends up getting crinkled up or just falling off the bodies completely. So it was very challenging, laborious, and time-consuming,” Allsopp says. “But importantly, it got me as a curator to think about the actual process of being a medieval artisan, and what it meant to handle gold.”

The team also applied some pieces of blue and green ceramic tile samples to the altar, to visualize how the colored enamel halos above each apostle might look in different temperatures of light. “The whole thing was surreal,” Bispham says.

Time to test

With the mock-up complete, the lighting design team came to Getty to try out different types of lighting. The Getty preparators set up the mock altarpiece in an empty gallery space, and then it was a matter of testing different types of light and seeing which colors, brightness levels, and placements around the altarpiece created the effects the curators hoped for. They wanted the light to help bring out the three-dimensionality of the altarpiece, the vibrancy of the gold, and the cool blue and green tones of the enamel, while also creating movement similar to real sunlight and candlelight.

“It was a balancing act between, ‘What do you prioritize; what do we want to bring out more?’” Bispham says. “It was amazing watching just how completely different it looked in different lighting conditions. And I think that's when I really appreciated just how much of an impact lighting can have on the object.”

The final lighting concept combines different elements. Lighting from below the altarpiece features warmer tones with a slight flicker to create a candlelight effect. Additional lighting starts at the top right side of the altarpiece and moves across towards the left, emulating how light would have entered from high up in the church and moved throughout the day. At the same time, the light changes color, since early morning light is cooler in tone than bright sunlight at noon and the warm glow of twilight.

The altarpiece as performance art

Lumen: The Art and Science of Light is part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the landmark Southern California arts event that explores the intersection of art and science, and is co-curated by Kristen Collins, Nancy Turner, and Glenn Phillips. In Lumen, the Stavelot altarpiece will be one of many medieval and contemporary works on display that utilize and manipulate light to evoke a sense of wonder, the passage of time, and the divine.

The Stavelot altarpiece was made to aid and enhance prayer and establish the abbey as a sacred space. With lighting that recreates some of that magic, perhaps visitors will feel drawn into the altarpiece much as they would have in the 12th century.

“Given the reflective quality of the metalwork and the way in which light falls across its surface, this altarpiece is fundamentally performative, even if you're not viewing it in the context of a religious ritual,” Allsopp says. “We hope that in the exhibition, with the changing lights, you can still experience the shimmering dynamism of the play of light and feel embedded within a multisensory experience.”

View the Stavelot altarpiece at the Getty Center in Lumen: The Art and Science of Light through December 8, 2024.