Full Description
This book traces the development of scientific conservation and technical art history.
It takes as its starting point the final years of the nineteenth century, which saw the establishment of the first museum laboratory in Berlin, and ground-breaking international conferences on art history and conservation held in pre-World War I Germany. It follows the history of conservation and art history until the 1940s when, from the ruins of World War II, new institutions such as the Istituto Centrale del Restauro emerged, which would shape the post-war art and conservation world.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, conservation history, historiography, and history of science and humanities.
Contents
1 Introduction: Experts in the Interbellum Part 1 Science, Authentication and Issues of Conservation 2 "We Cannot Splash Light onto Our Palettes": The 1893 Munich Exhibition and Congress and Its Public Demand for Research on Painting Materials and Techniques 3 A. P. Laurie and the Scientific Appreciation of Art 4 Seeing Through the (Old) Masters: The Crisis of Connoisseurship and the Emergence of Radiographic Art Expertise 5 Rome 1930, the International Conference on the Scientific Analysis of Artworks and Its Legacy in Italy Part 2 Education and Professionalisation 6 Mending, Sticking, and Repairing: Reconstructing Conservation Expertise in Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 7 Wissenschaft, Vocation, or Bildung?: Debating the Sites and Aims of German Art History at the End of the Nineteenth Century 8 Education in the Art and Conservation Field in German Countries 9 Experiments in a Teaching Museum: The Fogg's "Laboratory for Art" Part 3 Museums and Institutions 10 Omnium Gatherum to a 'Treasury of Art and Science': The Development of Conservation Expertise at the Ashmolean Museum 11 The (In)visibility of the Paintings Restorers of the Rijksmuseum in the First Half of the Twentieth Century 12 Gemäldekunde. German Pioneers of the 'Science of Painting' 13 Invention as Necessity: The Salvage of Italian Frescoes During World War II 14 Expertise, Multiple Actors, and Multiple Voices
