This article could have carried this title: "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Art restoration." I didn't know that conservation specialists were using such advanced technologies. Let's start with this introduction.
Lasers are only one of a panoply of scientific tools that conservators are deploying to preserve and study the objects in their charge, and to winnow the genuine from the fraudulent. In the name of research and conservation, works of art are bombarded with light, both visible and invisible; they are probed by electron beams; they are inoculated with bacteria; they are even having their DNA read. And for those deemed too precious for permanent display, copies that would make the greatest forger envious might one day be created.
Let's now look at an example from the National Gallery, in London.
The conservation laboratory of the National Gallery, in London, would not look out of place in a university chemistry department. Here, scientists spend much of their time analysing microscopic samples taken from paintings and trying to work out their precise composition, the better to help art historians and conservators understand the work before them.
To this end, the gallery's paintings are subjected to a variety of treatments. Scanning electron microscopy examines the surfaces of samples for minute signs of damage. Gas-chromatography mass-spectrometry (GCMS) passes vaporised paint samples through a device which separates and identifies their organic molecules (oils, proteins and so on). Fourier-transform infra-red spectroscopy (FTIR) shines a beam of infra-red light on to a sample and then detects which wavelengths have been absorbed by various molecules. And infra-red reflectography probes those secrets of composition that artists thought they had hidden for ever.
Infra-red reflectography is the basis of "Art in the Making", an exhibition that has just opened at the gallery. It is a way to examine a painting's "underdrawings" -- the successive layers of work beneath the visible surface. This reveals how much chopping and changing the best artists have tried before they hit on a winning composition. It works because infra-red light, which has a longer wavelength than visible light, can penetrate the paint on the surface but can nevertheless be reflected from underdrawings that have been covered by later brush strokes. By applying suitable filters to the camera which records the reflected light, it is possible to take clear photographs of any underdrawings.
[To see what they mean, here is an image of Jacopo Pontormo's painting "Joseph with Jacob in Egypt." The original Economist image is here, but I reproduced it locally for performance reasons.]
The Economist then looks at many other museums or conservation companies, from Crete to France, or from the University of Delaware to the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
This is a must-read article for all museum visitors and lovers.
Source: The Economist print edition, November 7, 2002
10:07:27 AM
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