The digital world encourages us to see paintings as images that are transferrable from museums or galleries to lecture screens, computers and phones. Paintings are, however, unique physical objects, each with their own complex set of non-transferrable material properties.
The first seminar will introduce and provide an overview of Old Master paintings as combinations of components – typically varnish and paint layers on wood or canvas supports. It will focus on the visible appearance of paintings and outline the ways in which each component can change over time to influence a painting’s appearances.
The second seminar will outline the scientific methods available to conservation studios that can enhance the visible examination of paintings. These invasive and non-invasive methods – X-ray, infrared, ultra violet, cross sections, etc – provide information for conservators and restorers that can guide their treatment of paintings.
The third seminar will focus on a relatively recent development in the restoration of paintings – ‘technical art history’. This practice, a branch of ‘material culture’, takes advantage of the opportunities offered by conservation studios to examine, and interpret, the physical nature of paintings. The seminar will incorporate factors covered in the first two seminars and combine them with the cultural context in which a painting was created. It will use The Paston Treasure, 1664 (now in Norwich Castle Museum), as a case study.
All seminars will be illustrated with images of paintings in the Fitzwilliam Museum and in public collections across Britain that have been treated in the internationally renowned conservation studios of the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge.
