VIII. Voices from the Field: Collaboration in Technical Art History

In the last issue of Materia, we launched a new, interview-based series titled “Voices from the Field,”¹ designed to encourage discussion and debate on the topic of technical art history as an academic discipline. How do we define the field? Can it be said to have a standardized methodology or theoretical framework? Is there room for improvement in how we approach the technical study of artworks, particularly when it comes to how we organize interdisciplinary collaborations?

It is with this latter question in mind that we have conducted the interviews presented in this latest edition of “Voices from the Field.” Sticking with the current issue’s theme of Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Benefits and Challenges, we were keen to explore the perspectives of three different scholars, each representing the various fields typically associated with technical art history: conservation, conservation science, and art history. As will no doubt be familiar to many of our readers, technical art history deals with multiple different areas of expertise, ranging from traditional art historical knowledge grounded in archival research to domains of natural science, such as chemistry, optics, and mechanics. In addition, the tacit knowledge of practicing conservators is often of great value in technical research, as their first hand interactions with art objects provide a unique perspective that is difficult to replicate in other contexts.

Interviewees

Erma Hermens, Director, Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge, and Deputy Director, Conservation and Science Division, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Professor Erma Hermens is Director of the Hamilton Kerr Institute for Easel Painting Conservation and Deputy Director Conservation and Heritage Science at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK. She brings research teams together comprising technical art historians, conservators, scientists, working closely with Fitzwilliam curators and, depending on the research questions, other Cambridge University Departments, such as the magnificent herbarium, and other museums. She is also the lead for the Fitzwilliam Museum and the HKI, together with the University Library and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, of the Cambridge Heritage Science Hub (CHeriSH). From 2016-2022 she also occupied the Rijksmuseum Chair for Studio Practice and Technical Art History, University of Amsterdam, and was a Rijksmuseum senior researcher. Before Amsterdam, as associate professor at the University of Glasgow, she led the Technical Art History group in the Centre for Textile Conservation and Technical Art History and established the first European MA in Technical Art History. She is a co-founder and co-editor in chief of ArtMatters: International Journal for Technical Art History.

Sabrina Norlander Eliasson, Professor of Art History, Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University and the Swedish Institute for Classical Studies in Rome

Norlander Eliasson is Full Professor in Art History at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University. She is the founder and director of the international master’s program Technical Art History and the Art Museum. She is currently heading the project Art and Science: Cultural Transfer and Mobility in the Age of Liberty in collaboration with the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and Emmebi Diagnostica Artistica in Rome. She is also currently deputy director for the Swedish Institute for Classical Studies in Rome (2023–2025).

Erich Uffelman, Bentley Professor of Chemistry and Department Head of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Washington and Lee University, Lexington City, Virginia

Since 1999 Uffelman has taught a course on the technical examination of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. He has been awarded external funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), American Chemical Society-PRF, Research Corporation, Hewlett Packard, Associated Colleges of the South, Kress Foundation, among others. Uffelman helped teach the NSF CWCS Chemistry in Art Workshops from 2005 to 2017 and was part of a Kress Foundation initiative spearheaded by Jennifer Mass and Rick Johnson to create a technical art history syllabus suitable for undergraduates. Among the museums and other institutions with which he has collaborated are the National Gallery of Art, Frans Hals Museum, Winterthur Museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, Stichting Restauratie Atelier Limberg, Mauritshuis, Smithsonian, Balboa Art Conservation Center, Monticello, Mount Vernon, Dordrechts Museum, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Bonnefanten Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Chrysler Museum, Rijksmuseum, Guggenheim, NU ACCESS, and dozens of colleges and universities.

Questions

You started out as a chemistry undergraduate and now you head the department at Washington and Lee University. How did you become interested in the technical study of art objects, and what motivates you to introduce your science students to this field of research?

This question requires a bit of storytelling. My journey in science really began with the NASA Apollo program, which completely captivated me as a small child. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon several days before my seventh birthday, and I learned during the broadcasts that Armstrong’s birthday was the same as mine! I told that to everyone who would listen for a month. So, I started reading adult astronomy books in second and third grade; the Apollo 13 tragedy/triumph happened when I was in third grade; and of my parents’ best friends, the husband was a chemist—and he quickly became my childhood hero. Fast forward to Bucknell University, and I was blessed from the outset of my college career with chemistry professors who were passionate about teaching and research and who really went out of their way to mentor me. As a PhD student at Caltech, I was surrounded by people who were rabid about science, and my doctoral advisor, Terry Collins, was not only dedicated to chemistry but to furthering my research skills and helping me every step of the way. My postdoctoral advisor, Jim Collman, was the perfect person to complete my training—his group also did great science, and in his words, he“ran a finishing school for assistant professors.”

Where does the art come in? I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, hours from any large museums. When I was fifteen years old, my father went on sabbatical to England, and he took our family with him. I got to see major museums for the first time and, with all of the wisdom of a fifteen-year-old with a Y chromosome, I pronounced that only the seventeenth-century Dutch painters knew what they were doing, and everything else was second-rate. That got me obsessed with how those Dutch painters achieved the effects they achieved, and so I started reading about seventeenth-century Dutch painting in my spare time. I wanted to know: “How did the Dutch painters do what they did?” As I got more mature, my tastes in art expanded exponentially, and I went to art museums any chance I could get.

By the time I was in my early thirties, I had begun my career at Washington and Lee (W&L) and was continuing to do the synthetic inorganic research that I had been doing in one way or another at Bucknell, Caltech, and Stanford. But by then, I had read about Dutch painting and conservation in my spare time for seventeen years, and so I began formulating plans to teach a course on the technical examination of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. My life experience as a child through adulthood not only gave me a passion for science and for art, but powerfully motivated me to share that with my students. There are things and people that change our lives for the better, and I wanted to give that gift to my students. I taught my first course on the technical examination of seventeenth-century Dutch painting in 1999, and by 2005 I had taken students abroad to the Netherlands for the course for the first time. Some of this is discussed in my 2007 papers.²

That 2005 course in the Netherlands was crucial for so many reasons, but one was that Petria Noble, then at the Mauritshuis, suggested I attend the ICOM-CC Triennial Meeting in Den Haag later that fall. I had such a great time at that meeting that I then attended an AIC National Meeting in Richmond, Virginia, the following spring. At both of those meetings, I asked lots of technical questions, and I realized that many of my new friends did not have scientific equipment or ready access to scientists. I thought to myself that if I wrote an NSF proposal for portable instrumentation, I might be able to help some of my new friends with their work. I was very fortunate that the NSF funded two proposals I wrote for portable instrumentation, and I have been further supported by W&L in the acquisition of portable instrumentation. W&L is a purely undergraduate institution, with the exception of a School of Law, and so we have no graduate students. As such, my work in cultural heritage science led me to end my synthetic inorganic chemistry research in 2009 due to limited time resources—I still miss it, but I do not regret the transition at all. Our 2014 ICOM-CC paper tells a little about the early collaborations that emerged from the NSF’s support, and how we integrated both cultural heritage scientific research and education into a seamless package.³

Nearly a decade later, and we have been part of twenty-one papers in cultural heritage science and education and two dozen students have been coauthors. I have been so lucky in this voyage to have had a couple hundred museum professionals interacting with me, and I have especially benefited from the scientific insights of Jennifer Mass, John Delaney, Kate Dooley, Greg Smith, Marc Walton, and Aaron Shugar; in the education arena, I helped mentor the NSF Chemistry in Art Workshops for a dozen years, and benefitted from the educational insights of Michael Henchman, Pat Hill, Deb Simon, Anthony Lagalante, and Jeff Fieberg. But I could have named so many more people who have impacted me—the generosity of many people in this field is extraordinary. That is another thing that I really enjoy sharing with my students—the joy of collaborating with brilliant, kind people. The payoff is getting to see what my amazing students do with their lives and careers.

Speaking as a scientist, how do you feel your approach towards technical study differs from that of an art historian? For example, are there differences in terminology, methodology, or point of entry when it comes to posing research questions?

I think it might be out of place for me to compare my approach to that of an art historian, given that I am not an art historian. I can tell you how I approach things.

The first thing I am looking for in technical study is great people with whom to work—collaborators who are smart, generous, interesting, and who “play nice with others.” And that is also what I seek in my students who are going to engage in the work. If you bring great people together, great things happen. The second thing I am looking for is an interesting problem, and that is never a challenge, because I have so many incredible art conservation friends who are always finding interesting problems. Then, the methodology or point of entry is dictated by the nature of the problem and the team of people assembled to solve it or investigate it. The key to victory is good conversation—everyone should be talking and everyone should be listening. One delightful new collaborator I had several years ago said to me, “I have noticed that when your student offers you an opinion on how something should be done, you actually sometimes change your course of action as a result of her suggestions.” I want my students and me to be constantly learning from our partners. I am hoping they are learning things from us, and if we are all doing that together, we often generate some cool results.

There is another key aspect of scientific research, and that is following an experiment to its very end—not assuming an outcome before you have completely finished the analysis. One of my all-time favorite results in this field illustrates that point. My students and I were working with Carol Sawyer at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) on a John White Alexander (American, 1856–1915) painting. Carol is always very clever, and she figured out there was an earlier composition underlying the surface composition. In the X-radiograph, the face of the underlying woman was not clear. Carol invited my students and me to the VMFA to try to get an image of the face. We used an InGaAs IR camera and shot five photographs with five different filters having wavelengths from 900 to 1700 nm. The results were crushingly disappointing—there was absolutely no trace of the underlying face in any of the five images. However, when we processed the five images into a flatfielded, registered, calibrated data cube and then did principal component analysis, the face popped out of the third minimum noise fraction image! That happened around midnight in the hotel in Richmond, as my students and I had been crunching data together in my room. It certainly made the next day at the VMFA more interesting! Those results can be seen in a 2019 publication.⁴

Another important thing in scientific research is to identify your weaknesses and areas you do not understand well and go after them. I was trained as a synthetic inorganic chemist. My expertise in organic and inorganic chemistry have been immensely helpful in the cultural heritage science I have done. However, I realized years ago that my lack of knowledge of signal processing and imaging science was going to limit me if I did not do something about it. So I have been fighting with textbooks and papers and YouTube videos in that subject area, trying to get better and, I think, slowly succeeding at getting better. But a big way to go after your weaknesses is to collaborate with people who are smarter and better at what you do not know. I also think it is a great example to students to show them that you just constantly have to strive to learn more. I am about to turn sixty-one, and I think my students see how driven I am to keep learning more.

Amongst your many contributions, you have written previously on the contextualization of chemistry in art and archaeology. How can chemistry complement art history?

So here I think you are referring to two book chapters I co-authored for Contextualizing Chemistry in Art & Archaeology.⁵

I like to tell my students that scientists who don’t talk to art historians can say very stupid things about paintings, and art historians who don’t talk to scientists can say very stupid things about paintings. So many pigments have their own degradation pathways, varnishes age, supports age, and all of these issues affect how a painting “looks.” If you are interpreting how a painting should be read based on aspects of how it looks, and you do not understand that what you are seeing now may be very different from what the artist painted in their studio, you are open to possibly considerable embarrassment. For example, there was a video made by a prominent art historian a few years ago interpreting a very famous painting by a very famous artist, and the art historian spoke about how the artist had specially ground his paint in order to achieve the appearance of dew on rooftops. In fact, the “dew on the rooftops” was lead soap formation—a situation involving what art conservators refer to as inherent vice—the lead white reacts with the linseed-oil fatty acid triglycerides.

Several years ago, I had an art history student in my class who was a little dubious about what we were doing, and so I showed her a photograph of a late religious painting by Rembrandt van Rijn. I showed her that, unlike Rembrandt’s usual technique of illuminating the face and hands of the sitter from the upper left and leaving passages in darkness—chiaroscuro—in this painting Rembrandt had the entire face in shadow and the white blouse of the sitter was in bright light. I asked her to interpret what Rembrandt was doing. After taking a few minutes to think, she launched into a very eloquent iconographic interpretation of why Rembrandt had changed his lighting scheme in this painting. After listening to her, I said: “That is a very clever analysis. But what I didn’t tell you is that at some point, this painting was only cleaned in the center, and then the treatment was stopped. You have interpreted partially removed yellowed varnish.”

What I really enjoy, however, and where I hope science contributes especially to art history, is using technical methodologies to get inside the artist’s head. Seeing the artist’s underdrawing, seeing the artist’s pentimenti, seeing the artist’s finished painting as it might have looked when leaving the studio (by employing computational un-aging strategies)—these contributions get at the heart of what the artist tried to accomplish. I think our ongoing work with the Frans Hals Museum on their Maerten van Heemskerck Saint Luke Painting the Virgin (1532) is a nice example of that.

What are the main benefits versus the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration? What does collaborative research offer that individual viewpoints cannot?

I think I cheated a couple of questions ago and started addressing this a little early. I will add this:

For my students and me, interdisciplinary collaboration is absolutely essential. For one thing, although W&L has a fine collection of art and historical objects and superb curators, our collections and our staff size are obviously limited compared to those of internationally regarded museums. Thus, collaboration gives us access to some of the world’s greatest art treasures.

Another super-important aspect of this is that I chose to teach at an undergraduate institution, and my teaching load and teaching responsibilities are significantly greater than those for faculty at an institution that focuses on its PhD program. I am not complaining—I chose that life intentionally, and it has incredible rewards. However, spending significant chunks of each year teaching first-year and sophomore chemistry does take me away from reading as much literature as I would like or attending as many conferences as I would like. I am really fortunate to have very erudite colleagues at research institutions who enthusiastically help me continue to stay current in my work with generous advice and suggestions and conversations when I see them. I mentioned several names above, but three more examples would be Karen Trentelman, Mathias Alfeld, and Francesca Gabrielli, as well as a small army of young, emerging European and American scientists who help me try to keep up to date when we gather at meetings. The Gordon Research Conferences on Scientific Methods in Cultural Heritage have been an incredible resource for me in maintaining contacts with friends and colleagues all over the world. On the conservation side of things, my friends at the National Gallery of Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Stichting Restauratie Atelier Limberg, Frans Hals Museum, Mauritshuis, Rijksmuseum, Buffalo, Winterthur, etc., help me understand where their field is. And anybody or any institution I have not named I hope I have not offended.

I would say the biggest challenge for me in collaboration is finding the time and resources to maintain the collaborations.

Having read the other participants’ responses, do you have any further comments or reflections on the topic of interdisciplinary collaboration?

I found reading the other responses so enlightening!

It occurred to me on the subject of perhaps saying something further about collaboration that we should briefly push the discussion I touched on regarding imaging science and signal processing to include the increasing role of machine learning and artificial intelligence in data and image analysis.

I think one can weave a narrative that includes work from folks like Rick Johnson, Eric Postma, Ingrid Daubechies, Rob Erdmann and see not only the incredible contributions this kind of research is bringing into the field, but also how much more the future is going to be influenced by computational methods of increasing sophistication. I just taught last May a new, experimental four-week intensive course at W&L titled Imaging Science in Art and Medicine with Applications to Astronomy. We used a new medical school radiology-imaging textbook, and I brought Roxanne Radpour (who was then at John Delaney’s lab; she is now at the University of Delaware) to guest lecture on chemical imaging in art; I had our own IT specialist Tom Marcais talk about AI image generation; and I brought in my physics colleague David Sukow to discuss his radio telescope research.

It was astonishing how all of that fit together. I have an art history colleague, George Bent, who is, I think, really pushing the boundaries of digital humanities by collaborating with cultural heritage stewards, scientists, technology experts, and a team of undergraduate interdisciplinary researchers to create virtual reconstructions of artwork within pointcloud and photogrammetric models of architectural spaces. His work has involved architectural scanning, computational wedding of different content, and rigorous traditional archival research.⁶

These technical developments, matched by increasing social emphases on bridging geographical and

cultural divides to enhance the globalization of cultural heritage conservation, are making for very

exciting times in this field!

Questions for Erma

In 2012 you published a book chapter describing technical art history as a “synergy of art conservation and science.”⁷ Ten years later, in what ways do you think the discipline has developed? Have the three different perspectives become more integrated over time?

Let’s start with the ongoing debate surrounding the status of technical art history as an independent discipline. It is evident that the envisioned synergy of art, conservation, and science, as highlighted in the title of my 2012 paper, has not seamlessly materialized across these three domains. The organic growth of collaboration between these disciplines is still evolving, underscoring the continuous discourse on the definition, recognition, and establishment of technical art history as a distinct field of study. There are of course many excellent examples of successful synergy; these often correlate with cultural heritage institutions and universities equipped with the necessary resources, analytical kits and conservation and science studios/labs, and comprehensive teaching programmes.

There is some much needed increase in undergraduate and postgraduate programs—both in art history and science—introducing technical art history into their curricula. This is crucial to educate a new generation of researchers trained outside the disciplinary box, to confidently engage with scientists, conservators, and scholars from diverse fields depending on the research questions and objects under examination.

During the pandemic lockdown, I worked with four talented postgraduate technical art history students from the University of Amsterdam on a curious object at the Rijksmuseum—a sizable green sea-turtle carapace painted with a portrait of Prince Frederik Hendrik on horseback, dated ca. 1631. We could not examine the object first—although we had detailed images and an X-radiograph—as we had no access, so decided to contextualize first by unraveling the stories related to the format and matter of this curious “painting.” This collaborative effort resulted in a series of blogs written by the Turtle Team and an Instagram account.

Our exploration revealed the richness of unexpected narratives connected to the material and making of the object, ranging from military history, culinary use, the utilization of the scutes for what is often mislabelled as tortoise shell in precious objects, medicine, explorers and piracy, trade, natural history, and the art of painting on a turtle shell. The richness of these stories prompted discussions with specialists ranging from trade historians and marine biologists to conservators of tortoise (turtle!) shells. The project is now being turned into a publication, co-authored by the Turtle Team. This was a great experience for the students, showing how data obtained through examining the object, scientific analyses, and imaging—all fairly taxonomic—need interpretation and contextualization. The Aristotelian approach of addressing the so-called five Ws: what, why, where, when, and who, and also how, aligns very well indeed with the research objectives of technical art history, and provides a good checklist for understanding the various directions of research.

The substantial advancements in heritage science have bolstered robust scientific research into processes of degradation and change, crucial to our understanding and preservation of cultural heritage. While the focus remains on a scientific comprehension of these processes, with results published in (heritage) science journals, the gathered data can also forge interdisciplinary contextual research. This extends beyond the phenomena of material/chemical/physical change, to delve into processes of making, workshop environments and collaborations, artistic and artisanal idiosyncrasies, knowledge exchange across disciplines—for example, pigments used by painters but originating in the glass industry—and more. Incorporating insights from the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and inviting collaborations with other specialists if required (we were no specialists on green sea turtles!), enhances synergies that prove to be exceedingly valuable for art history, conservation, and science alike. So, yes, progress has been made, but a better balance still needs to be found.

What are some of the main challenges of interdisciplinary research? What do you think needs to happen in order for these to be addressed and/or overcome?

Ideally, interdisciplinary research functions as a collaborative team effort, where each team member contributes expertise from within their respective disciplines. This fosters a dynamic and continuing dialogue among team members as they collectively tackle a specific research question, ensuring a fair and level playing field for all involved. Given the object-based and object-led nature of technical art history research, these collaborations tend to grow organically, drawing in scholars from different disciplines who offer insights based on their specific expertise.

This approach demands thinking beyond disciplinary boundaries and embracing a variety of viewpoints that can influence individual and collective research trajectories. This requires researchers to be agile and responsive to the evolving nature of these collaborations. When successful, this interdisciplinary magic unfolds, epitomizing that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

However, navigating this terrain is not without challenges, as the persistent dichotomy between the arts and the sciences is still tangible, despite numerous initiatives. The huge increase in scientific analytical research, driven by the advancements in sophisticated technologies or new applications of existing ones, has led to robust investigations into the physical composition of artefacts, degradation processes, and physical changes, usually published in scientific journals.

Conversations with scholars in arts and humanities reveal a difficulty in engaging with what they perceive as complex scientific research. Bridging this gap necessitates a culture shift on both sides. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, growing funding for this type of research is encouraging the establishment of interdisciplinary collaborations by starting dialogues between the arts and humanities and the sciences.

A noteworthy initiative in the United Kingdom is the World Class Laboratories Fund launched by UK Research and Innovation in 2020 as an area of investment. The Arts and Humanities Research Council, as part of this initiative, introduced the Capability for Collections Fund, investing £25 million in heritage science equipment and lab refurbishments across universities and the heritage sector, to create a heritage science infrastructure across the UK. This has, for example, led to the establishment of the Cambridge Heritage Science Hub at the University of Cambridge, bringing together expertise from university departments, museums, and research institutes. The hub has already sparked numerous collaborative interdisciplinary projects, extending its reach to (inter)national partners in the sciences, arts and humanities, and social sciences, aligning with the funding’s objectives.

Such initiatives can be transformative, as they build research infrastructures that nurture interdisciplinary collaborations. However, this is a specific UK initiative and much more can be done to create research infrastructures that forge synergies and are global in scope.

Given that technical art history research is centered around objects and guided by art historical research questions, museums, galleries, and cultural heritage institutions play a vital role in facilitating research. They can actively encourage scholars from different disciplines to engage with their collections. Nothing works better than bringing a group of scholars together around an object or objects, to start a conservation.

Your current position is that of director at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge, which has a long tradition of using replicas—a unique research approach that is often used by conservators as a means of understanding the material structure of paintings and other art objects. How can the use of replicas complement other research perspectives, such as chemical analysis or archival research?

Reconstructions, replication, and re-enactment (RRR) are performative methods that are employed across various academic disciplines. Originating in the natural sciences but also developed, for example, in anthropology, they are now well established methods also in technical art history.

At the Hamilton Kerr Institute, as an important part of the first- and third-year curriculum, our students engage in the meticulous reconstruction of early Italian tempera painting techniques, various forms of gilding, as well as the examination and reconstruction of early Northern European and seventeenth-century Netherlandish paintings, using works from the Fitzwilliam Museum collection in Cambridge. For example, the current cohort reconstructed details from Saints Geminianus, Michael and Augustine, with angels above (tempera and gilding on panel, ca. 1319) by Simone Martini, from the Fitzwilliam’s collection. The panels were accessible due to research that was taking place, a collaboration involving one of our conservators, our heritage scientists, and scholars from the history of art department, in which the students could participate as the data collected informed their reconstructions. In year three, the students work on a full replica of a painting and include extensive research of the techniques and materials through scientific analytical and imaging methods. They report on their research and the trajectory of reconstruction set against the increasing body of literature on this performative method, as well as on its value for understanding historical methods and materials, identifying change, and assessing the condition of works.

Reconstruction methods play a pivotal role in experiential and experimental research, and go back some way. Recently a critical examination of their application has ignited a comprehensive discussion of RRR. This discourse underscores the variability in the use of RRR methodologies, both in execution and research value across different disciplines. Moreover, it sheds light on how insights gleaned from diverse applications can strengthen the use of RRR within the realm of technical art history.⁸

In the past, reconstructions of recipes were often performed at face value. However, an increasingly more informed and in-depth exploration of art technological texts has demonstrated that such recipes need meticulous research and contextualization to grasp aspects such as their truth value, as well as uncovering tacit knowledge embedded in the practitioner’s mind—a knowledge derived from many years of experience but often omitted in written records. Scientific analyses and imaging of objects made with similar techniques and materials prove invaluable to fill in gaps in our knowledge and thus enhance the accuracy of our reconstructions.

Engaging with practitioners, particularly those versed in historical methods, as they may be able to provide crucial details such as temperatures, length of firing, use of tools, provides the missing pieces of the puzzle. Contextualizing recipes by examining other art technological texts and other related archival materials further deepens our understanding of the texts under investigation.

Archival research hence emerges as a necessary component to expand our contextual knowledge encompassing workshop and studio environments, staff, place, time, and hierarchies. In essence, reconstructions, being inherently performative, involve the reenactment of techniques aligned as closely as possible with historical recipes (or for example, with artist’s instructions for remaking in modern/contemporary art). This process, ideally conducted in a contemporary workshop setting, if possible, could include workshop assistants and contributes significantly to what I would call the “choreography” of the workshop. This encompasses the division of tasks, master-assistant-apprentice working relationships, tool usage, workshop configuration, etc.

In essence, reconstructions can serve as complementary tools in research, filling in informational gaps, and function at the same time as integral components of reflective and reactive research, where various methodologies—scientific analyses, archival and (art) historical research, history of science—continuously inform and influence one another, shaping the overall flow of the research process.

At times there appears to be a kind of tension between technical study and more traditional art historical perspectives, whereby the latter even takes terms such as materiality to mean something representational or phenomenological relative to the viewer, as opposed to purely material or matter based. Would you like to see a standardization in language or nomenclature when it comes to discussing the material qualities of artworks? If so, how could this be achieved?

Terms such as materiality can indeed indicate a more conceptual approach, whereas in technical art history we, as is assumed, primarily look at materiality as stuff artworks and objects are made of. This is quite a sweeping “short cut” generalization! The hand/mind division is often used, for example, to indicate the difference between art history and technical art history, between a more theoretical approach and a more hands-on method. The strength of technical art history, however, can be found in the combination of theoretical frameworks. This can be seen, for example, through the concept of the object biography or itinerary, and the evidence of traces of making, the maker, external impact, inherent material changes, different functions and status, etc., over time.

Contextualizing the language or nomenclature is crucial for clarity, but that will suffice. Standardization of terminology, in this instance, could prove restrictive and hinder an open discussion for both approaches. Combining the two approaches might actually lead to insightful and important research. Consider, for example, the link between the materials and processes chosen by the artist or artisan to make an object and their historical meaning. This connection could be particularly strong in modern and contemporary arts, where the boundary between the dual interpretations of materiality, material, and making tends to be rather fluid.

Having read the other participants’ responses, do you have any further comments or reflections on the topic of interdisciplinary collaboration?

Having read Erich and Sabrina’s interviews, one thing clearly stands out: teamwork, it is all about teamwork. Ideally interdisciplinary, as that reflects the richness of technical art historical research. Each project may require a different combination of expertise. I just finished an extensive report commissioned by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, on technical art history, which will be available in January, and I am happy to say that Snow’s two worlds also appear there, as yes, we have come a long way, but there is much more to do to really connect the arts and humanities with the sciences. Materiality in the sense of the actual stuff artefacts are made of, which can be mineral, organic, but also ephemeral, contains many more stories than just the chemical composition. It is the story telling where technical art history comes alive: the story with the many hybrid data, including scientific analytical ones, we collect.

Questions for Sabrina

Your background is in early modern painting, with a particular focus on the Roman Baroque. When did you start integrating a technical perspective into your research? Was there a particular impetus that made you do so?

In the years 2009–2015, I was heading a research project at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. During the work, which would eventually lead to the publication of volume 1 of the catalogue raisonné Italian Paintings: Three Centuries of Collecting (2015),⁹ we came across a seventeenth-century copy from Caravaggio’s Saint John the Baptist (1604–6) in the collection of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Corsini in Rome. The painting was suffering from its nineteenth-century conservation but it was clear, not the least from the typical Roman canvas, that it had been completed in the artist’s lifetime or close. The research field concerning Caravaggio’s “versions” is particularly rich and controversial, so I contacted a team in Rome (Emmebi Diagnostica Artistica) that was currently completing a major technical campaign on Caravaggio’s Roman works.

This collaboration led to a complete technical campaign (2013) on the Nationalmuseum painting. For me it was an eye-opener. For the first time, I had the opportunity to closely follow the working process, the collecting of data, and the subsequent interpretation. At the same time, I became aware that many of my own questions that followed the technical campaign were highly contextual from a historical perspective. That is, the technical results did not “stay with the painting” but opened up a series of questions concerning provenance, collecting practices, the use of copies in the seventeenth century and beyond, and the development of the art market in the early modern era. I found that so many of these questions, traditionally belonging to a conventional art history field, could be addressed in a more complete and scientifically satisfactory way by using, for example, multispectral analysis, X-radiography, and, not the least, paint cross-sections. This was my first—and very hands-on—encounter with technical art history.

More recently, you have been acting as course coordinator for the technical art history master’s program at Stockholm University. Given that many of the students joining the program have an art history background, in your experience what are some of the biggest learning curves that the students experience when it comes to integrating more scientific or technical perspectives into their research?

This is obviously a huge challenge. We were aware of this presumed problem from the start and involved straight away colleagues from the Department of Chemistry to design an apposite introductory course for majors in art history. The students managed surprisingly well to achieve the basic knowledge that was needed. Nevertheless, I observed that they struggled to connect it to the materials of the artworks. This is undoubtedly due to a huge fault in traditional art history training, where the artistic techniques are not explained or taught at all. Our students found themselves learning about chemistry and aspects such as tempera technique at the same time, which naturally, slowed down the overall learning process. From a more general perspective, methods that spring from the natural sciences naturally conceive the concept of “interpretation” in a very different way to the humanities. This, obviously, also reflects upon the students’ response to a different way of elaborating data and understanding them.

Do you feel that art historians and scientists have different points of entry when it comes to the technical study of artworks? How do their research questions and methodologies differ?

They differ a lot and there is nothing strange about that. It is precisely within this difference that technical art history has an important role to fill. A purely scientific approach to an artwork risks being, in my opinion, a bit self-fulfilling and insular: that is, a never ceasing collection of data that constantly refers back to the materiality of the artwork with no contextual outlook whatsoever. As a contrast, a conventional art historical approach would probably embrace a concept like “style,” “form,” or “visual effect” with no connection to the materiality of the artwork or the material or technical choices made by the artist in question but instead more of an intellectual and conceptual choice that takes form. This division between the elaborations of the hand/matter and the mind/concept has had a long life within Western intellectual tradition, and it still reflects upon the methodologies in the natural sciences and humanities, respectively.

In the mid-twentieth century, the British scientist and novelist Charles Percy Snow spoke about the “Two Cultures”—reflecting on the growing epistemic divide between natural science and the humanities.¹⁰ We are now in the twenty-first century, downstream of various philosophical and theoretical discussions that took place during the 1990s, most notably the so-called “material turn,” which helped coin the use of terms such as “materiality” within art history.¹¹ Do you think that there are still theoretical and/or terminological divides between science and art history? If so, how can these be addressed?

The “material turn” was a positive trend at the time. Yet, I do not think that it has resolved the gap between the humanities and the natural sciences in the way that technical art history can be said to have done. Materiality, as an intellectual concept, continues to address topics in a purely theoretical way and based on research questions that are dear to the humanities: context, class, gender. In doing so it offers an extremely valuable set of tools that, if handled sensibly, may accompany technical investigations in order to find answers to specific questions. According to my experience, art historians tend to be more comfortable working with the concept of materiality rather than to approach, elaborate, and integrate scientific data that comes out of a technical campaign into their research. This is due to training, obviously, but also a mindset that relates back to the previous question and the dichotomy of mind and matter. A way to address these divisions could be to integrate the different perspectives in joint collaborations such as conferences and published proceedings or, in terms of museum exhibitions, to work more with topics that relate to artistic processes, tools, and materials in projects co-curated by art historians and conservators. These are really simple proposals but they seem to be very difficult to promote on a large scale.

Having read the other participants’ responses, do you have any further comments or reflections on the topic of interdisciplinary collaboration?

I was very pleased when I read Erich’s and Erma’s interviews since they perfectly reflect so many of my own thoughts on this topic. It also shows, I think, that our experiences, both as scholars and teachers, are very similar. Among many common thoughts, I would like to stress the importance of the research (or student) team. With collaborative, enthusiastic, and friendly people, it is easier to reach a common goal out of different perspectives.

1. “Voices from the Field: Technical Art History Today,” Materia: Journal of Technical Art History, no. 3 (2022), https://issue-3.materiajournal.com/essay_voices-from-the-field/[https://issue-3.materiajournal.com/essay_voices-from-the-field/](https://issue-3.materiajournal.com/essay_voices-from-the-field/) ↩︎

2. See for example: Erich Uffelman, “Teaching Science in Art: Technical Examination of 17th-Century Dutch Painting as Interdisciplinary Coursework for Science Majors and Nonmajors,” Journal of Chemical Education 84, no. 10 (2007): 1617–1624, https://doi.org/10.1021/ed084p1617 ↩︎

3. The details of this collaboration can be found in: Erich Uffelman, Liesbeth Abraham, Julia van den Burg, Samuel Florescu, René Hoppenbrouwers, Femke van der Knaap, Jorinde Koenen, Mireille Te Marvelde, Herman van Putten, Jessica Roeders, and Kate Seymour, “A New Three Legged Stool: Research and Educational Ventures Between the Frans Hals Museum, Stichting Restauratie Atelier Limburg, and Washington and Lee University,” ICOM Committee for Conservation preprints, 17th Triennial Meeting, Melbourne (Paris: ICOM, 2014), 0310. ↩︎

4. Carol Sawyer, Bruce Suffield, Adam Finnefrock, Harris Billings, Erich Uffelman, Joseph Zoeller, Mark Dombrowski, John Delaney, Kathryn Dooley, Jennifer Mass, Jelena Samonina-Kosick, and Madison Whitesell, “A John White Alexander Painting: Comparison of Imaging Technologies for Resolving a Painting under Another Painting,” Journal of the American Institute of Conservation 58, nos. 1–2 (2019): 37–53. ↩︎

5. Erich Uffelman et al., “X-ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy in Painting Analyses: Undergraduate Classroom, Teaching Laboratory, and Research,” in Contextualizing Chemistry in Art & Archaeology: Inspiration for Instructors, ed. Kevin Labby and Kristen Braun (Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 2022), 135–164; Erich Uffelman et al., “Multispectral and Hyperspectral Reflectance Imaging Spectrometry (VIS, VNIR, SWIR) in Paintings Analyses: Undergraduate Teaching and Interfacial Undergraduate Research at the Nexus of Chemistry and Art,” in Contextualizing Chemistry in Art & Archaeology, 165–216. ↩︎

6. See https://florenceasitwas.wlu.edu/[https://florenceasitwas.wlu.edu/](https://florenceasitwas.wlu.edu/) ↩︎

7. Erma Hermens, “Technical Art History: The Synergy of Art, Conservation and Science,” in Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, ed. Matthew Rampley et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 151–65. ↩︎

8. Sven Dupré, Anna Harris, Julia Kursell, Patricia Lulof, and Maartje Stols-Witlox, Reconstruction, Replication, and Re-enactment in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). ↩︎

9. Johan Eriksson, ed., Italian Paintings: Three Centuries of Collecting, vol. 1 (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2015). ↩︎

10. Charles Percy Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). The original publication was based on a Rede lecture delivered by Snow on 7 May of that year, at the Senate House in Cambridge. ↩︎

11. Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (London: Duke University Press, 2005). ↩︎