The reflections on the frames are a problem, that you cannot elimiate, as the old-time frames are curved and one part or the other will reflect light directly into your camera, however you position the lights. What you need to do is, control these reflections!
First I must confess, that I never have done that particular kind of shooting myself, so what I will recommend is based on reading and theory:
I would simply not use brollies. Place large transparent scrims, at least as high as the painting, better, even higher, besides the paintings and place your lights farther away behind the scrims to illuminate these fully. These scrims will spread the light more evenly and over a large area. You will still get reflections, but they will by very evenly and then harldy noticeable as reflections, as they will not be specular and you won't have the tell-tale non-reflecting parts.
Otherwise for reproducing paintings one would usually place polarizers in front of the light sources (both with the same angle of rotation) and an additional polarizer on camera and is thus be able to eliminate most if not all reflections. But I do not really know, whether this would work on golden frames, if they have a real leaf gilding.
Ben
Last edited by Ben_Edict; 04-25-2009 at 04:13 AM.