Preserving Art through the Ages
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Preserving Art
through the Ages
Pamela B.Vandiver, Guest Editor Preserving art through the ages is more than placing a designated object in a museum, properly storing and exhibiting it. Preservation involves more than preventing the destruction and looting of sites or the theft of and illicit trade in antiquities. It is more than conservation—that is, the assessment, documentation, and stabilization of an artifact’s condition, and, if necessary, the skill and judgment to rescue an artifact, to intervene using a reversible treatment, and to follow with a program of monitoring stability. In this issue of MRS Bulletin, our aim is to show how modern materials analysis is being used to understand and prolong the life of materials used for artistic and cultural expression and also to learn about history and the human condition through the scientific study and interpretation of “things.” To properly preserve is to understand what we are defining as significant enough to be preserved. We try to establish the details of date, place, context, materials, technology, and cultural meaning—the same expectations we have of an informative newspaper article. The art object or archaeological artifact or site actually represents specific knowledge, meaning, and culture, and that is what inspires museums to study and preserve for re-study a painting, stone sculpture, astrolabe, or even a supposedly useless potsherd or ugly fragment of furnace or kiln.
Using Materials Analysis to Understand Material Culture Through contextual analysis and deconstruction of artifacts, we can reach back through time to develop a critical understanding of how ancient people used craft and technology to solve problems of survival and organization, and to make symbols or representations of what was important in their world, especially for its maintenance, longevity, and beautification. This process is known as the study of material culture and cultural heritage. Cyril Smith,1 a pioneer of materials science and its use in understanding ancient objects,
MRS BULLETIN/JANUARY 2001
said that objects speak; they certainly cannot distort, lie, or “spin” like a text can. In this quest to learn from objects, materials science has special philosophical and practical roles. The structure–property– processing–performance paradigm of materials science provides the template and the methodology, and materials laboratories provide some of the cutting-edge tools to do the job. To preserve the past, one must have not only the objects, but also an understanding of the knowledge and skills used to produce them. Such analysis requires many disciplines, and in the case of the article by Stephenson, Stephenson, and Haeffner, two brothers—one a scientist and one a historian—have collaborated with an expert in high-energy x-ray techniques to enrich our appreciation of an ancient scientific instrument, the astrolabe. Preserved for their beauty and fine craftsmanship as art objects and for their utility in astronomy and navigation, astrolabes allowed the user a special status an
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