Feddi

Our field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art was an amazing opportunity to learn about the many different facets of art conservation. We started our tour in the Greek and Roman gallery where we looked at the residual purple color found along the edge of a statue’s robe. While purple was a common color to adorn the robes of upper class individuals in ancient times, the conservation science team at the Met were perplexed because when they analyzed the purple color they found traces of gold instead of the purple pigment they expected. While they first thought that there used to be gold designs in addition to the purple pigment, they later discovered that it was in fact gold nanoparticles that were the right size and shape to produce a purple color. Next on our tour, we visited the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas gallery, where we learned that art conservation is not limited to preserving old artwork. We were told that some of the pieces in this collection, such as a large wooden instrument, came from the 20th century. Despite their relatively young age, these pieces still need to be preserved and thus the museum has shades over all the windows in the gallery in order to prevent the artwork from being damaged by the sun. This theme of newer art pieces also needing to be conserved continued when we visited the Museum of Modern Art and learned that modern materials and techniques can sometimes pose a problem to conservators. One such art piece was Klein’s Blue Monochrome, which we saw in the MOMA conservation labs. Klein’s use to matte color with no varnishes is making it more complicated for conservators to fixes the scrapes and other damages that have befallen the painting. The realization that the ancient world can still surprise us in their production of color and that modern art needs protection too were a few of the many amazing insights we received into the world of art conservation while on our tours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MOMA.

 Laurence

Visiting the Metropolitan museum of art is always an amazing experience. This past friday (July 29th) with the SCIART program, students, myself included, got a behind the scenes tour of one of the most pioneering and research intensive museums in the art world. Up there with the Tate museum, the Louvre, and the Walter’s, the Metropolitan has one of the best equipped and most gifted art conservation and research labs in the world. After being brought on a brief tour of greco-roman hellenistic art (New Greek and Roman galleries) by our gracious host (and chief scientist in the department of scientific research at the Metropolitan museum of art) Marco Leona, we were brought into the basement conservation and research labs. I met a very welcoming and interesting conservator from Iran, Parviz Holakooei, here and after the SCIART students had been given a quick walkthrough of all the different instruments used in the lab  (XRD, XRF, SEM/EDS, Uv-Vis, Raman) we talked about what his research projects as a junior fellow at the metropolitan museum of art have been this past summer. He had been working on two project he was aiming to finish in the following month. One on opacifiers, opaque surface particle present in first millennia bc Persian glazes, and another on analyzing the coloring agents on iranian glazes. At the time he was in the process of finishing research on both of these projects and took me to the XRD he had been recently using to analyze the surfaces of persian glaze shards. The presence of certain characteristic elements such as lead antimonate and brizziite were important for concluding the use of opacifiers and confirming his hunch. He was extraordinarily passionate about his research and interested in drawing a conclusion in order to make a significant finding regarding the history of these material and the region, finishing his fellowship on a strong note. Being from iran he told me how he moved to italy and kick started his career in the cross section of art and science by taking conservation science classes at the University of Ferrara. He told me how and why he became an art conservation scientist and left a good impression on me regarding the importance, mysteries, and excitement in the field of art conservation science and art conservation.