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The
Science of Art Conservation
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Improving Art through Science
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It has been said that there is an art to science, but there is also science in art. How is technology changing the face of art conservation?
Ever since the
first cave painters mixed pigments with animal fat to make
them stick to surfaces, art and artistry have piggybacked
on scientific and technological innovation. There may be no
better place to see this relationship in action than in an
art conservation laboratory. Here, conservators use the tools
of modern science to examine and care for paintings of the
past.
At the Straus
Center for Conservation at Harvard University in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, microscopes and imaging technology stand by
easels, paints, varnishes, and resins. In this way, art and
science merge in a facility that is a cross between an art
studio and a forensics lab, which uncovers secrets hidden
in layers of paint.
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X-ray machines scan large art works for cracks just like they look under your skin for broken bones.
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Needles are used in biopsy fashion to pull tiny chips from paintings for examining under a microscope.
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Infrared cameras, developed to enhance night vision during the Korean War, look beneath painted surfaces to see the underdrawings that masters used to plan and prepare their paintings.
All these tools—tools
you would expect to find in a medical lab but not in a conservation
studio—help art conservators examine, understand, and
care for important works of art.
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Find a painting you like in a book about art. Pretend you are a conservator. What would like to know about this piece of art? How might technology help you?
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Helping High Art
Perhaps you know about the restoration of the Sistine Chapel. That's the chapel in Rome where Michelangelo lay on his back for five years to fill the ceiling with paintings that have become world famous. Many people thought Michelangelo had used dreary, somber colors. But in one of the most public undertakings in art conservation history, conservators cleaned the ceiling with gentle solvents and uncovered images full of vibrant, glorious color.
Take a closer look at the
restored paintings of the Sistine Chapel.
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The Benefits of Cross-Training
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Dirt, heat, humidity, and light—and poor conservation in the past—all take a toll. At some point in the life of almost every painting, there comes a time to call the doctor. At the Straus Center for Conservation, senior curator Teri Hensick doesn't make house calls or wear a lab coat, but she uses a microscope almost as much as a paintbrush. Many art conservators have backgrounds in the sciences—physics, chemistry, and geology—as well as in studio art.
For the past three years, Hensick has been restoring a painting by a seventeenth-century French artist named Jacques Stella.
Today, Hensick is inpainting. That is, she is repairing the layer where the paint has been damaged. Previously she has spent months looking through a microscope and scraping away bad repairs done earlier in the painting's life.
One of the most interesting parts of this restoration came early, when Hensick retrieved a sample of the painting. A needle stuck into a crack in the surface extracted a tiny fragment. Hensick encased it in a polyester resin and examined it under the microscope. What she learned was that while the surface of the painting had large areas of gray, the artist had, in fact, used a red ground, or initial, layer. It is the red you can't see that gives this large painting a warm, lighthearted cast.
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Why do you think it's an advantage to see a cross section of a painting?
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A Colorful History
Even the pigments—or colors—that artists use have been affected by technological innovation. The earliest artists dug colored soils from the ground or used natural dyes from plants. And up to the eighteenth century, pigment technology was in the hands of the artists.
But in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, chemists began manufacturing paint. Their discoveries were directly responsible for Impressionism because they gave artists a new and richer palate to work from, says Eugene Farrell, a conservation scientist a Straus Center for Conservation.
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Seeing beyond Surfaces
The Straus Center has been a leader in using infrared technology to explore beneath painted surfaces and to learn how the old masters achieved their effects. Infrared photography uses a type of light not visible to the human eye. Henry Lie, the center's director, says that this technology was ideal for art because of its ability "to let us look through all those layers of paint and see things no one has ever seen before."
This technology has changed how art historians work, Lie says. Having access to these "underdrawings"—the original sketches by the artist—makes it easier to determine the painter when there is a question of authorship. Infrared is also used to help detect forgeries and copies.
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A Conservator's Art
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Not all paintings are valuable or of interest to museums, yet all paintings require a careful approach in their conservation. Levon Tokatlyan is an Armenian-born artist and art conservator who trained in Russia before coming to America 10 years ago.
Like many in this profession, he does not ply his craft in a museum or an institution but in his home studio, where he restores paintings for customers. His approaches are not as high tech as those of his museum counterparts.
For Tokatlyan, conserving art is simply a labor of love.
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Levon Tokatlyan discusses the skills he uses in his job.
Click either the 28k or 100k button to view the video.
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