STITAH 2022

In mid-July, I participated in Yale's Summer Teachers Institute in Technical Art History, a weeklong seminar designed to give professors (not just art historians, but a couple of chemists and one painting teacher) first-hand understanding of art conservation and conservation science, with the theme "A Brush with the Artist." There were no assignments, unlike the NEH summer program I did in 2019; just daily on-sites in the galleries and labs, interspersed with hands-on workshops designed to give us a better sense of a few painting techniques. I counted myself lucky that I've always been interested in "technical art history," because if this was all otherwise new to me, I think I might have been bowled over by the amount of information coming at me at once. As it was, I found it immensely interesting and stimulating, if a bit maddening to recognize the vast gulf in resources between what YUAG and YCBA can do with the objects in their care vs. what we can do. 

One of the first class sessions in Dr. Hall's Renaissance grad seminar was entitled "The Hermeneutics of Facture." It was my first month of grad school, and I remember seeing that on the syllabus and thinking "oh shit, I am not cut out for this!" I actually don't know whether that was intended to be a joke (she does have a sly sense of humor) or it was just her being fancy. Anyway, I remember that we were assigned in groups to read technical articles, and mine was Joyce Plesters on the cleaning of one of the Titians in the NG London, possibly the Bacchus and Ariadne. I didn't expect to write my dissertation on Titian at the time, just happy accident, but I enjoyed it! Fast forward to 2012: in preparing for my exams, technical art history was one of the themes I was writing draft essays on. Here's my introductory paragraph:

Over the course of the 20th century, conservation and technical analysis became an integral part of the art historical apparatus.  As techniques (including X-rays, infrared, and chemical analysis) advanced, they have told us more about the materials, techniques, and working practice of individual artists.  Technical analysis has also responded to changes in the questions scholars are asking, for example as the field shifted from an early connoisseurial interest in separating original from copy to the growing interest in methods of reproduction in the workshop.  These developments have not come without controversy, particularly in terms of cleaning and restoration.  Particular problems also remain in terms of integrating technical data into art historical monographs and catalogs, although there have been recent promising advances.

Look at the baby art historian! Still putting two spaces between her sentences. Actually, STITAH corrected one misapprehension that I've evidently held since the beginning: elsewhere in the essay I made reference to chemical analysis of materials being possibly through the use of "core samples," which I envisioned as being extracted with a syringe, kind of like a geological core, but I learned that it's done with a scalpel, like slicing a piece of a mole for a biopsy.

Anyway, since I've been teaching the Technology and Art intro course, I've been able to apply some of my interests in the classroom, which has been really fun. It's kind of unusual to feel like something we're doing is "cutting edge" (it's Fairfield, c'mon), but Yale is only now redesigning its intro courses to follow a similar "deep dive" idea. And although it's always humbling to be reminded of the scale and scope of Yale's art collection, some of my fellow STITAH-ers were coming from institutions that had no collections of any kind to teach from. I'm lucky not only to have a museum, but to work in the museum, which makes it the easiest for me to use.

People were pretty interested by the Teaching Collection, too, which, I can boast here, was my idea: putting together not only art objects that don't rise to the level of accession-worthy, but also artists' materials and tools, into a collection that that students can actually handle and get a feel for. The Teaching Collection has our Wave That's Doing It's Best, for example, but also samples of Prussian blue, produced by the Chemistry and Art students. We have a lithographic stone and a Japanese lacquer box, both bought off Ebay in order to support education around specific exhibitions. I just acquired two samples of Carrara marble, including one chunk of the purest white that Michelangelo would have used, for my fall Renaissance class. It's pretty cool, and I'm proud of it, and it was really affirming to have such interest from professional colleagues, several of whom wanted advice on how to go about starting collections of their own. In our case, it's mostly happenstance: stuff Jim donated that was in bad shape, or the copy of the Guido Reni Madonna and Child that had been kicking around the library, and which a local art restorer test-cleaned pro bono, to show the difference after varnish and stain removal.

In addition to the varnish demo, the only real tool of conservation science that I can feasibly/cheaply/safely deploy is a UV flashlight I bought from Amazon, which can show discolored varnish as well as later overpainting. Megan was a little nervous about me flashing that on non-Teaching Collection objects, so imagine my delight to learn from the conservators at Yale that not only is it not an issue, they also bought their flashlights from Amazon! (Theirs was nicer than mine, so I immediately traded up). Of course, they typically employ a room-sized UV set-up, like the one in the photograph.

Other methods of investigation are just frustratingly out of reach. Watching them use the IRR camera on a painting was incredible, but they also had this nifty handout showing that different cameras that could perceive different wavelengths of IRR showed quite different results. It's been my burning desire to have some form of near-infrared imaging to use on our own objects. You often hear about modifying cheap digital cameras to remove the IR filter, which I attempted last year with a $50 Amazon camera, with no luck. I found a Heritage Science article on modifying a specific type of older Smartphone with the addition of a fairly expensive small lens, which I shared with a Physics professor who brings his Optics classes to the gallery. He expressed interest, but I need to follow up on that this year. Irma Passeri, the YUAG conservator, noted you can also buy DSLR cameras and have them factory-modded, but that's a thousand dollars or so (another reminder of Yale resources). Post-STITAH I discovered you can buy cameras on Ebay that have been "ghost-modded" - enabling infrared for ghost-hunters! Sadly, I doubt that those kinds of mods would achieve the wavelength necessary to reveal underdrawing on a painting, as opposed to "cold spots" in a house.

Anyway, among my other discoveries: mixing ground pigment with oil is harder than it looks (as pictured). I was a little bummed we didn't to attempt to grind any pigments, though obviously for reasons of time, a lot was pre-prepared for us. That included these panels, which had been gessoed, applied with bole (the dull red at right), gilded, and polished in preparation for us to try our hands at various forms of tooling and pouncing! The rabbit, at left, is an example of sgraffito, paint scratched away to reveal a design. We used carbon paper to trace the rabbit onto thin paper, laid the paper on the red area (painted with highly toxic cadmium red, for quickness of drying), "pounced" it with a sharp tool around the contours, and buffed in some charcoal to transfer the design. Then we did our scratching, and then we were free to decorate it by stippling dots into the gold with the same stylus. Next to it, we used sets of punching tools to add the decorative elements (a lot harder to press in than I expected), and used a compass and straightedge to add arcs and lines.

What I am not immortalizing here is the tempera painting exercise that we completed on the lower half of the panel, because damn, I sucked that that! They only gave us 3 tints, and our goal was to imitated a detail of some drapery off a 14th-century panel, and mine was...not good. If I use the upper part of this panel for teaching (if I ever do Early Ren, that is), I'll be taping an index card over my shame at the bottom. The same went for the oil exercise, which I didn't even bother to bring home. We also did a sumi-e workshop with a Japanese painter, and after he helpfully added in the bamboo leaves that I, after 30 minutes of practicing, could not manage to wrist-flick properly, I declared my work done, brought it home, and gave it to my sister. She gives me the boys' art all the time, and since mine was of about the same level, I figured why not repay the favor.

I came out of the week having learned a lot and energized to see how I might put even a tiny bit of this into practice. We have a painting in the TC that we're pretty sure is a modern imitation of an early Renaissance panel painting in oil, but Irma told me that Raman microscopy would be the only "proof" of the binder. I asked around - no Raman microscope at Fairfield. Ditto XRF (one of the scientists, Anniko, passed around their XRF "gun" and cheerfully told us it costs about $50k), which could help identify pigments. UV can only show some overpainting, as well as fluorescence of the white highlights (which matches lead white, as opposed to titanium or zinc white, but so what? A modern forger could well have used more traditional materials...). If I had an IRR device I could check for underdrawing. Even with just raking light I can see incised lines for some of the background and the halos. But alas, Fairfield's on-campus resources just aren't quite there. We've asked Yale to look at some objects for us before (our mystery Chinese plaques, which in their elemental composition matched ancient Chinese gold objects), but never a TC-level object that we're pretty sure is a "tourist art" piece, just based on stylistic analysis; Carey and I agreed that the angels' hair just "looks" wrong, for example, plus there's an inscription on the frame, Ave Maria Mater Pia, that does not seem to have been used in the 15th/16th century, based on my rudimentary research. It's a little frustrating to know we could have so many more answers about this object in a couple of hours, if we had Yale's material and intellectual resources! Arghhh.

Anyway, I contented myself with taking our pigment collection - much of it verrrrry toxic, like all our bright cadmium reds, yellow, and orange - to my colleague Dorothy in the chem lab, who rehoused them into small glass containers. Here are a few that I arranged into a little rainbow after labelling them!