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This bulletin, the third in an annual series which Archetype Publications produces in association with the British Museum, offers a new forum in which to showcase a dynamic behind-the-scenes glimpse of the current work of curators, conservators and scientists, conducted on a range of artefacts and materials across the collections at the British Museum. Also available:
British Museum Technical Research Bulletin Vol I ISBN 9781904982272 British Museum Technical Research Bulletin Vol 2 ISBN 9781904982357

This bulletin, part of an annual series which Archetype Publications publishes in association with the British Museum, offers a forum to show a dynamic behind-the-scenes glimpse of the current work of curators, conservators and scientists conducted on a range of artifacts and materials across the collections at the British Museum. Contents: Foreword – David Saunders; The study and conservation of four ancient Egyptian funerary portraits: provenance, conservation history and structural treatment – Nicola Newman, Lynne Harrison, David Thomas, Joanne Dyer and John Taylor; Maker, material and method: reinstating an indigenously made chair from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa – Catherine Elliott, Caroline Cartwright and Philip Kevin; A Bulgarian kukeri mask: a diplomatic gift and the conservation of its polyurethane foam decorations – Clare Ward, Nicole Rode, Marei Hacke and Judy Rudoe; A traditional Chinese method for weakening silk for use in the conservation of silk paintings – Vincent Daniels, Marei Hacke, Jin Xian Qiu and Valentina Marabini; Analytical study of the first royal Egyptian heart-scarab, attributed to a Seventeenth Dynasty king, Sobekemsaf– Gianluca Miniaci, Susan La Niece, Maria Filomena Guerra and Marei Hacke; Scientific analysis of a Buddha attributed to the Yongle period of the Ming dynasty – Quanyu Wang and Sascha Priewe; Examination and experimentation: conservation of an archaeological glass unguentarium for display – Julia Barton, Andrew Meek and Paul Roberts; Simple sophistication: Mauryan silver production in North West India – Paul Craddock, Caroline Cartwright, Kirsten Eckstein, Ian Freestone, Lalit Gurjar, Duncan Hook, Andrew Middleton and Lynn Willies; An unusual decorated skin coat from Canada: aspects of conservation and identification – Pippa Cruickshank, Caroline R. Cartwright, Jonathan C.H. King and Antony Simpson.

This bulletin, part of an annual series which Archetype Publications publishes in association with the British Museum, offers a new forum to show a dynamic behind-the-scenes glimpse of the current work of curators, conservators and scientists conducted on a range of artefacts and materials across the collections at the British Museum.

This bulletin, the second of an annual series which Archetype Publications is publishing in association with the British Museum, offers a new forum to show a dynamic behind-the-scenes glimpse of the current work of curators, conservators and scientists, conducted on a range of artifacts and materials across the collections at the British Museum.

British Museum Technical Research Bulletin, Volume 6 is part of an annual series which Archetype Publications publishes in association with the British Museum. It offers a forum to show a dynamic behind-the-scenes glimpse of the current work of curators, conservators and scientists conducted on a range of artefacts and materials across the collections at the British Museum. Also avaliable in the series: British Museum Technical Research Bulletin Volume 1 ISBN: 9781904982272 British Museum Technical Research Bulletin Volume 2 ISBN: 9781904982357 British Museum Technical Research Bulletin Volume 3 ISBN: 9781904982487 British Museum Technical Research Bulletin Volume 4 ISBN: 9781904982555 British Museum Technical Research Bulletin Volume 5 ISBN: 9781904982678

This bulletin is the first of a new annual series which Archetype Books is publishing in association with the British Museum. It offers a new forum to show a dynamic, behind-the-scenes glimpse of current work of curators, conservators and scientists, conducted on a range of artefacts and materials across the collections at the British Museum. This volume includes papers on: the conservation and analysis of the John White watercolors, the effects of ultraviolet-filtered light on fabrics, shell garniture from Gujarat, the black bronzes of Burma, the use of Variscite as a semi-precious stone, the effects of relative humidity on the corrosion of iron, the emperor’s terrapin, Aztec conch shell working, and pigmented inlays from the tomb chapel of an Old Kingdom noble.

Colour on paper presents significant treatment challenges and research opportunities for the conservator and conservation scientist. Understanding the use of colored media on paper informs art historical interpretations of works of art and leads to a better appreciation of technique. Recently, a distinguished group of conservators, conservation scientists and art historians came together in Chicago to discuss and debate advances in the investigation of colored media as used by artists over five centuries. This book presents the edited proceedings of the conference, ‘The Broad Spectrum: The Art and Science of Conserving Colored Media on Paper’, and is centered on five broad themes: – Pastel and Chalk – Watercolor and Ink – Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Materials – The Colored Materials of Asian Art – New Methods and Technologies for Assessing Fading of Colored Media This comprehensively illustrated volume represents a unique collection of expertise and will be of interest to art historians and curators as well as researchers, practitioners and students of conservation. The title is due for publication in May 2002.

This volume contains papers from the 2014 ‘Conservation of Hair’ conference hosted by the Horniman Museum, ICON and the Natural Sciences Collections Association which provided a broad forum for discussions on the conservation of hair in museum objects. Within museums hair is used in many shapes and forms and the papers within this volume discuss the conservation of taxidermy, historic wigs and hair within modern art. This volume also moves from past to the future conservation of hair, looking into how hair has been used in the past, protection from pests within museums today and looking forward to research possibilities for the re-coloring of faded taxidermy specimens.
The papers published in this collection (supported by a generous donation from Abegg-Stiftung), all presented at Dyes in History and Archaeology meetings, demonstrate how dyes were used through the centuries. If one century is chosen – the 17th century, for example – a fascinating comparison can be made between the dyes and dyeing methods used in Europe, in Turkey, in South America and in Japan, not only on textiles, but also in the pigments used for painting.
Taking a different approach, chemical analysis has assisted detective work enabling a distinction to be made between rather similar 18th-century textiles with chinoiserie motifs, not all of which were Chinese in origin.
Over the long time scale covered in this book, many developments took place and are described in its pages. One of the most exotic of dyes, shellfish purple, was used in Late Bronze Age wall paintings dated to the 17th century BC at Akrotiri, while over 3000 years later the brilliantly colored, but sometimes impermanent synthetic dyes, devised by chemists, appeared on the market: the azo dyes, fluorescein, the eosins and others. A long and distinguished history of the use of color, a glorious variety of dyes revealed – the diversity of dyes in history and archaeology.
The papers in this publication will be talks at the three day Gels in Conservation conference held by IAP in association with the Tate.
The conference brings together a diverse group of conservators, conservation and other scientists, and students of conservation to present and discuss the theory and practical use of gels in various branches of conservation (paintings, paper, wall paintings, textiles, museum objects etc).
The papers and posters collected in Gels in the Conservation of Art cover topics on the theory of Gels, recent developments in Gel technologies, clearance and residues, systematic evaluation of Gel properties and effects, and preparation and practical issues with case studies concerning wall paintings, easel paintings, contemporary art, textiles, archaeological objects, paper, sculpture, mixed media, traditional materials and more.
The Gels in Conservation conference will be held in October 2017.

There is no need to delve deeply into English history to appreciate the importance of the horse and its saddle. Saddles carried Roman, Saxon and Norman invaders across Britain, sustained the peripatetic English monarch and court, and advanced Tudor trade and Stuart civil war. From the 18th century the English saddle developed rapidly into the world’s leading design and remains pre-eminent today. It is not difficult to find recent books describing the classic English saddle of the 19th and 20th centuries, but none deal with earlier saddles. The authors of the present volume, which is based upon a conference held in 2002 at Saddlers’ Hall in London, explored rare books and manuscripts, private and fine art collections, archaeological fragments, museum stores and family records to piece together this account of the historic antecedents of the English astride saddle and the parallel development of the side-saddle. Few people in history owned saddles as these were cumbersome and expensive objects. Although horse ownership increased after the Middle Ages, saddle survival depended upon a coincidence of care, neglect and good fortune. The conservation of several of these rare survivals has made it possible for their hand manufacture and original decoration to be described and illustrated for the first time. This book describes how collaboration between archaeologists, restorers and experimental riders enabled a Roman saddle to be recreated and ridden. This delightful and beautifully illustrated volume should fascinate riders, archaeologists, conservators, historians and curators alike.

This volume seeks a solution to the problem of methods of preservation for the rapidly developing and complex field of contemporary and modern visual art. Despite adopting the new concept of heritage, the aims and methods of conservation have remained the same, evolving very slowly by following some changes in the history of ideas, human experience and techniques of conservation. The authors of Innovative Approaches to the Complex Care of Modern and Contemporary Art relate complex conservation practices to an awareness of the need for a multidimensional approach to the care of modern and contemporary art. Maintaining a dialogue with history, they boldly confront the typical patterns and accepted evolution of the theory of conservation by looking at the wider perspective including the most recent history of any work of art – documentation, interviews with artists, records of image, the sound of performance, consent to e-installation, emulation etc. – and bearing in mind as the first principle primum non nocere and various legal issues.

Chalks and pastels are particularly appropriate materials for portraits because they appear effortlessly to convey the warm tones and soft, matte velvety surface of skin. Portraits and head studies therefore figure prominently in histories of pastel.

The Invention of Pastel Painting describes the relatively sudden emergence in the later seventeenth century, of sets of friable pastel sticks and a new artistic practice of painting in pastel. The author reconsiders the use of natural and fabricated drawing sticks as tools, firmly locating their use in the context of historical function. ‘Artistic techniques have a social history; they are signs endowed with cultural meaning by society.’
The visual, documentary and etymological evidence does not support the concept of a narrative history of pastel gradually progressing from a ‘simple’ original state in the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, Jean and Francois Clouet and the Dumonstiers to an increasingly richly colored and technically complex visual record in the paintings of Robert Nanteuil, Joseph Vivien and Rosalba Carriera, and then continuing to evolve through the nineteenth century.
In considering the history of chalk and pastel, the author argues that the change is aesthetic, not formal, and is grounded in social function and technical response. She has drawn not only on artists’ letters and accounts, documents, critical and theoretical writings, and, broadly, the secondary literature, but also on close visual examination and scientific analysis of selected chalk drawings and paintings in pastel, particularly those created between 1500 and 1750.

This important book presents the results of a comprehensive technical study of the painters in Cologne between 1400 and 1450. It represents a major step forward in understanding the materials and techniques of panel painting in the 15th century achieved through dendrochronological evidence and examination of the ground and intermediate layers, pigments etc. In addition to discussions on the results of the analyses, there is a catalogue of 29 fifteenth century panels together with the results of their examinations.

A useful guide to the processing of coins from excavations, which will be valuable reading for conservators and archaeologists, and museum curators.

The origins of metalpoint (silverpoint, goldpoint, etc.) drawing are widely thought to lie in classical antiquity. The Luminous Trace investigates the artefactual and literary evidence for the use of metalpoint through the ages from earliest times up to its revival, particularly in the United States, in the later 20th and early 21st centuries, reviewing the history and historiography of metalpoint and its use for drawing and writing. Metalpoint drawings are the central objects of this study and their physical features are the prime consideration, juxtaposed with the written evidence which may suggest why artefacts look as they do.

Medieval painting was a craft. The anonymous Montpellier Liber diversarum arcium (‘Book of various arts’) is a handbook prescribing how that craft was to be practiced. It contains over five hundred art-technological instructions or ‘recipes’ in Latin. Unlike the vast majority of medieval artists’ recipe books, this content is highly structured and organised, such as to form a complete handbook or course on painting. This Liber diversarum arcium is probably the most substantial and comprehensive medieval painters’ technical recipe book to survive. It summarises the state-of-the art in the European workshops of the fourteenth century. This volume makes the Liber diversarum arcium usable to modern readers for the first time, by restoring the text in over 150 places where its corruption obscures the technical sense, by translating the text into English, and by providing a running commentary to explain the technical processes and technical terminology.

Along the great Silk Road, numerous objects of cultural heritage survive as witnesses to the mingling of indigenous cultures with ‘foreign’ cultures. One type of surviving witness is mural painting and the papers in this volume are witnesses themselves of a colloquium on the subject of Mural paintings of the Silk Road attended by art historians, historians and archaeologists, scientists and conservators from East and West, held in Tokyo in 2006. A newfound recognition of the vastness of the Silk Road, along with a genuine rediscovery of the ancient cultural exchanges that took place there is reflected in this collection of papers which examines the range of information (art styles, techniques and materials) encapsulated within mural paintings, allowing the reader a glimpse of the dynamism inherent in the cultural exchanges between East and West. Today, parts of the Silk Road, rich in the magnificence of the ancient arts they possess, are often located in countries facing major challenges. Countless important archaeological sites are in danger of demolition or severe damage by human encroachment or turmoil. This symposium also addressed such issues – more from an Asian point of view, reaching beyond European perspectives. This volume is published in association with the Japan Center for International Co-operation in Conservation, National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, and contains the proceedings of the 29th Annual International Symposium on the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, January 2006.

This book is an exciting pan-European art detective scenario investigating four Netherlandish paintings from the 16th century. The busy compositions all present Christ chasing the moneylenders from the temple and reuse popular iconography influenced by the famous painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The researchers – art historians, conservators and scientists – use Technical Art History, a new and exciting approach which combines art historical and conservation research with scientific analysis, to unravel all the stories presented in these fascinating paintings, taking the viewer back to the 16th century, into the artist’s studio and to the stories told.

This book is a collection of scientific papers written over 30 years by Karin Groen on aspects of the painting of Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Leyster, Vermeer, Van Gogh etc. The author tracks the historical development of the application of scientific techniques in research into artists techniques and materials and examines phenomena such as the changing of green pigments to blue, the use of red in preparatory layers, binding media, blanching and organic pigments.

Technical examinationsof the Ghent Altarpiece have yielded an immense body of data since the 1950s. Conservators and art historians have relied heavily on this information to support theories about the working methods and materials of Jan van Eyck, but should these theories be directly applied to van Eyck’s other paintings?
A review of conservation dossiers for works attributed to van Eyck, his contemporaries and earlier artists has, together with physical examinations of paintings carried out for this study, highlighted many common painterly practices. These investigations have also identified demonstrable differences between the Ghent panels and other paintings in the Eyckian corpus – differences that are considered in detail here in terms of the appearance and allocation of pigments in the paint structure. This exploration of technique and physical format has opened a path for new responses to questions about the production of some of the most iconic images in the history of art.

This is the English language edition of El Poder de los Colores by Gabriela Siracusano, published by Fondo de Cultura Economica, Buenos Aires 2005 – the result of a study of cultural practices related to the uses of coloring materials in the South American Andean region during the Colonial period (XVI to XVIII centuries) and their ‘powerful’ presence in the images of the Conquest. It offers the reader a new insight into the techniques and use of colour in Andean Colonial painting. Starting with an analysis of the images and the concept of representation during the process of evangelization/domination, the book shows the discursive and iconographic strategies used by different parties to achieve several goals through the use of color. The book’s main hypothesis is that colors were silent protagonists of the Andean ritual system, a fact that was identified only by certain ‘idol exterminators’ who tried to ‘rebrand’ them by giving them a Christian meaning.

The people who care for, handle and work with collections of cultural artifacts and works of art understand the sensitive nature of the materials and are in a unique position to observe changes in their condition. This publication is intended to aid them in the identification of environmental damage to cultural artifacts and of potential sources of that deterioration, resulting in the prevention of damage to these irreplaceable objects.

Despite conservation’s long history of outreach and the energy that is currently going into presenting the field to museum audiences and others, outreach remains underrepresented in the conservation literature. Conservators may increasingly be more comfortable talking to the public about what they do but, until recently, we have been reluctant to talk amongst ourselves about how we approach these interactions.
This volume of papers presented at a conference (Playing to the Galleries and Engaging New Audiences: The Public Face of Conservation.) in Williamsburg,Virginia, confronts the issues that arise when conservators find themselves asked to present their efforts not only through traditional means (exhibits, lectures, behind-the-scenes tours etc.) but also via blogs, podcasts, video learning and other emerging technologies.