Authenticity: Interpreting Damage and Restoration in Medieval Sculpture (original) (raw)
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Collegium Medievale, 2017
The focus of this article is retouching of medieval sculptures in norwegian churches. Our aim is to discuss past and current practices by analysing conservation treatment reports. We study the reasoning behind the decision making to the extent the information is available in the reports, and assess the reports as source material. To form a background for the discussions, we review relevant literature on history of retouching. We study conservation treatment reports in the period from c. 1970 to date and we have a data set consisting of 65 reports. Our results show that over half of the reports include decision making for retouching the artwork. The data set also shows changes through time in retouching techniques and methods. We discuss the reasons for differences in past and present practises after registering changes in conservation ideology and the development of the conservation training. Discrepancies between written retouching theories and conservation practices are assessed. The article also discusses conservation reports as source material. Since we have studied practices within our own institution, objectivity is a part of the discussion, along with possible future projects that may follow from this research. In conclusion the conservation treatment reports reflect changes in conservation education, the profession's ethics, retouching methodology and decision making. The reports give us descriptive information about the objects and their condition, but the chosen retouching procedure is often coloured by the individual conserva-tor's values and perspectives. The material, which spans almost fifty years, clearly mirrors the tendencies in the methodology of visual reintegration.
History of the restoration of ancient stone sculptures
2003
The practice of restoration is so out of fashion nowadays that we are liable to dismiss it as a harmful error of the past that has further separated us from the accurate experience of antiquities. That may be true, but it is also the case that we cannot fully understand the status of fragmentary antiquities in the Renaissance if we do not appreciate how changeable these material conditions were.. .. Changes wrought upon sculptural objects represent attempts to fix their shape and identity.
erhaps no art is more tightly tethered to history than sculpture. Sculpture is memorable, able to stand outside without being destroyed immediately by the sun, the rain, the wind. More durable than paintings and works on paper, sculptures are messengers of historical information in the present. The author and courtier Baldassare Castiglione summarized fifteenth-century theories of sculpture when he wrote early in the sixteenth century that, "being made to preserve memory, sculptures fulfill this function better than painting." 1 The faces of Roman emperors, their gestures, and costumes all came down to the fifteenth century in hard stone busts and cold bronze coins. This is not an exclusively fifteenth-century phenomenon. Modern scholars and archaeologists continue to use statuary as sources for their histories of past cultures. But the idea that sculpture carried historical information was first developed in the fifteenth century, at the moment when Italian scholars started to mine ancient objects for information about the Roman Empire and Republic, including the way that ancients dressed and kept their hair. This essay offers a range of examples of artifacts in stone and bronze that were considered, in fifteenth-century Italy, as deposits of historical rituals and customs. These examples show that, in the minds of certain viewers, such objects were able to tell the truth, even that you could trust sculpture more than text. This had something to do with the durability of sculpture: more resistant to wear and tear than painting, prints, and drawings, sculpture was believed to deliver history unchanged, as it was. But sculpture was also conceptually closer to nature and the unvarnished truth. With its possibility of life casting and other imprinting
2020
Since antiquity, damaged marble sculptures have been repaired and restored, but in Rome, for a relatively short period between about 1750 and 1816, restoration became pervasive to meet the demands of a burgeoning market for antiquities. Driven by the excitement of the excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Grand Tourists wanted to possess their own piece of antiquity, resulting in an industry devoted to the excavation, restoration, and sale of marble sculptures to these sometimes-undiscerning purchasers. At this time, restoration practices ranged from simple cleaning to scouring with abrasives and tools, cutting away ancient stone, the replacement of missing limbs and heads, or the fabrication of new sculptures from disparate fragments of marble. With so many ancient marble sculptures irrevocably altered by eighteenth-century restoration practices, they could be considered inauthentic, no longer the product of an original artist and time period. Such a position, however, is an oversimplification of the complicated and multifaceted concept of authenticity. Using the ancient sculpture collection of Englishman Charles Townley (1737-1805), amassed at the height of the period, this thesis considers how definitions of authenticity can be applied to restored ancient marbles, and how they are subverted by the actions of restorers and dealers, the attitudes of eighteenth-century collectors, and the modern preoccupation with displaying authentic objects in museums. Townley’s collection has been largely unstudied and consigned to storage since the British Museum’s subsequent acquisition of unrestored and presumed-superior ancient Greek sculptures. However, through study of both Townley’s sculptures and his correspondence, this thesis analyses eighteenth-century attitudes towards authenticity and how closely those philosophies align with the restored artworks themselves. While most restored ancient sculptures are no longer representative of the time period they were carved and are not the product of an original artist, I argue that authenticity is a flawed definition by which to evaluate restored artworks, undermined by a myriad of factors. Instead this thesis demonstrates that collections such as Townley’s are more valuable for the significant insights they provide into the changing nature of collecting, aesthetics, restoration, and conservation, during and since the eighteenth century.
In the 12th century, the mosan region saw the reorganisation of the cult of the saints, that received more sanctity. Solemn ceremonies of elevatio took place ; translatio from older shrines to new ones often occurred. In this way ancient saints, martyrs, founders and local glories received new reliquaries. In the 13th c. some of these artworks were replaced by new pieces with a more up-to-date gothic style. With such succession and replacement of reliquaries, one can ask if, in one way or another, « souvenirs » of the ancient reliquaries, first containers of prestigious saints or founders relics, were preserved. The response is different from one case to another. Sometimes a part of the older reliquary has been integrated in the new one or has been kept apart with a new function. The reuse of fragments from ancient (medieval) objects on more recent ones, and the reuse of pieces from previous reliquaries on new ones, as material « souvenir », has already been noticed by art historians. But in general it is difficult to assert whether the reuse is practical and economical or « memorial », as a link with the prestigious past of the work. The use of old fragments also contradicts the desire to give reliquaries dignity by giving them a fashionable look and refusing out-of-date appearance. Some examples clearly show that workshops had old pieces in reserve, like enamels and engraved plaques, that could be used as « spare pieces » if necessary. Other pieces were kept just because they were beautiful. But in some cases it can be argued that fragments were reintegrated in an object as memorial material, in order to bring to memory the previous reliquary. This form of reuse can be linked to the practice of « pastiche » observable in different times, that is to say when an artwork that replaces an old one intentionally copies its typology and « spirit » as commemorative act. This communication will sound like a call to a more systematic study of reuse of medieval pieces. This question touches the value attached to reliquaries as sacred container of relics. How were the reused fragments of reliquaries used ? How, when and why were souvenirs of ancient artworks kept ?
The Two Lives of Objects: Artefacts and Artworks
How would you describe the kind of life that objects encounter before and after their entry in a museum space? To place these two periods (the before- and after-museum) in an antithesis is to rely on the way objects are treated by museums (the management team including curators and preservers). More precisely, the institutional construction or, more accurately, the museum’s attempt of re-forming these objects’ physical condition (appearance) and historical relevance establish fundamental questions about their authenticity (what it was before their entry in the museum by means of physical condition). I particularly point to the museum’s restoration acts, which are part of conservation processes and notify the museum’s request for ageless objects. This intentional approach to produce timelessness (in both physical condition and relevance) and the institutional strife for objects that appear as brand-new products seems like a matter of reconsidering the object’s biography by re-establishing the artwork’s history and its fixed life. Such an issue brings certain matters and questions into discussion.