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Introduction: Cabinet, elaboratory, gallery 1500–1800. The preservation of art and material culture in Europe

2021; Royal Society; Volume: 76; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1098/rsnr.2021.0079

1743-0178

Morwenna Blewett, Lucy Wrapson,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

You have accessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Blewett Morwenna and Wrapson Lucy 2022Introduction: Cabinet, elaboratory, gallery 1500–1800. The preservation of art and material culture in EuropeNotes Rec.76229–235http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0079SectionYou have accessIntroductionIntroduction: Cabinet, elaboratory, gallery 1500–1800. The preservation of art and material culture in Europe Morwenna Blewett Morwenna Blewett Ashmolean Museum and Worcester College, Oxford, UK [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author and Lucy Wrapson Lucy Wrapson Hamilton Kerr Institute, Mill Lane, Whittlesford, Cambridgeshire, CB22 4NE, UK [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Morwenna Blewett Morwenna Blewett Ashmolean Museum and Worcester College, Oxford, UK [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed and Lucy Wrapson Lucy Wrapson Hamilton Kerr Institute, Mill Lane, Whittlesford, Cambridgeshire, CB22 4NE, UK [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Published:08 December 2021https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0079Conservation practice, material exploration and their respective 'scientific' rationales were not confined to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They also existed in the early modern and modern periods. The papers in this special issue seek to challenge the idea that these types of physical and intellectual interactions with collected objects only emerged in the Industrial Age. Great scientific advances in conservation and related materials analysis were made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by various museum directors, conservators and chemists, and with them the evolution of prominent conservation theories. But these achievements have become disproportionately represented in the growing literature on the history of conservation and have served to dominate the narrative.1The idea for this special issue developed from a one-day online conference held in 2021, organized by Morwenna Blewett at the Ashmolean Museum. Lucy Wrapson chaired a panel session and made closing remarks, drawing together the interrelationships between seven diverse papers, which tackled the preservation of art and material culture at a wide range of places and dates. The papers highlight the themes that were right at the heart of the early development of the Ashmolean Museum in the seventeenth century, and were so very clearly in train the century before. Among them are: material investigation; preservation; debates around damage; deterioration; loss compensation; documentation; and the very function and purpose of conservation and preservation. All these considerations motivated interpositions that were certainly not 'unscientific'.The shadow of achievements in the history of conservation history, stemming from the nineteenth century, serves to cement and provide a compelling origin story, particularly for those who played a traceable and autobiographical part in those events. And, if we look closely, we can see this tendency emerging in the comments of some of the indisputably accomplished figures of the twentieth century. A typical example comes as late as 1978, when Harold Plenderleith, the chemist, archaeologist and conservator who had worked at the British Museum since 1924, said 'The conservation of these things only came into prominence with the scientific awakening of a century ago when procedure came to be founded upon the techniques of the laboratory.'2He frames these poles of development as 'primitive' prior to 1888—only becoming 'scientific' after Friedrich Rathgen's establishment of the laboratory in the State Museum in Berlin in that year. In Britain, Plenderleith suggests that this awakening is delayed another 30 years, placing scientific thought, objects and their conservation together only after 1920.3 The fact that this year happened to herald the era in which Plenderleith himself started working under Alexander Scott on museum materials, in a new laboratory setting after World War I, was, of course, no accident.But the range of papers here certainly serves to counter Plenderleith's confident declaration of the late and unique coalescence of scientific thought, objects and preservation. They prove that although the legacy of earlier periods remains relatively unexplored in the scholarly output of art history, history and philosophy of science, and that of conservation, the early modern and modern periods offer many examples of concerted efforts to investigate and to preserve, often with one facilitating the other. Discovery, collection, documentation and preservation were key activities that heralded the birth of the modern public museum, of which the Ashmolean is believed to be earliest. This interdisciplinary research addressed questions such as how were materiality, condition, alteration and disrepair viewed during in the early modern era? What measures constituted 'conservation' activity? What factors motivated these efforts? Who had agency to carry out or direct these interventions? Which materials and techniques were used? What can be learnt from recipes and notes dealing with problems such as materials' alteration? Did techniques evolve or improve, or were they phased out and abandoned? What influenced their use? Were wider political or societal messages closely connected to material preservation or investigation? What does this tell us about material culture and about the changing cultural and scientific roles of different categories of object in this period?Elias Ashmole stipulated that the new museum on Oxford's Broad Street, named for him, was to be housed in a building designed to promote scientific practice. On the first floor was a repository for the collections, with a lecture theatre for 'natural history' on the ground floor, while the basement contained a state-of-the-art chemical laboratory and anatomy room.4 The first keeper of the Museum, appointed in 1683, was Robert Plot, the first Professor of Chemistry at Oxford, who studied fossils and dinosaur bones, and launched his own search for a universal solvent.5 Ashmole, himself, had already explored the diverse range of materials he collected, and their material changes. He also brokered interventions motivated by the desire to preserve and to document. His diary is the perfect portal to these foci. Raging self-obsession aside, but one that was firmly within an early modern tradition of self-diagnosis and experimentation,6 his observations of condition phenomena concerning his own body paid close attention to the visual consequences of frequent ailments and accidents. He treats us to various descriptions of material changes and their bearing on conditions such as burning, scarring and swelling. The scar on the right side of his forehead, he tells us, was sustained when falling on to the hot metal bars of a fire grate as a one-year-old child.7 It is immortalized in a 1650 engraving for which Ashmole paid £7 to the artist William Faithhorne the Elder.8 The almost relentless onslaught of these physical observations in Ashmole's diary was ridiculed in a short article in the late eighteenth century by Town and Country Magazine with customary satire and sexism. The author noted in 1782, after reiterating a long list of Ashmole's toe-stubbings, toothaches, and gastric happenings, that 'From these, and other memorandums of the like in nature, we are inclined, with all due deference to his virtues, to look upon Elias Ashmole Esq as a respectable old woman.'9But beyond what appears to be an obsessive effort in bodily record-keeping, Ashmole made enquiries about materials and their associated physicalities and techniques. These are noteworthy and revealing of efforts to learn about techniques and material change that he would have seen manifest in objects outside as well as within his own collections. On 27 December 1650, he wrote in his diary 'I learnt seal engraving and casting in sand and goldsmith work'.10Similarly, his last will and testament also leaves us in absolutely no doubt regarding his commitment to thinking about materials, and how they would fare over time using measures that we would certainly recognize as preventive conservation strategies. He stated 'Books of copper cuts and books 'lynned in colours' are to be preserved in the Museum Ashmoleanum in presses, with locks and keys to be provided for.'11But as well as arresting structural damage in the form of averting dimensional change and the physical securing of materials, there was also a fatalistic acceptance of damage and deterioration. This acceptance was attached to contingency planning in the form of generating visual documentation as a record, but which also served as a material proxy—a transposition for when the condition of an object was no longer representative or when it was totally destroyed. Ashmole set out in the Statutes:that whatsoever natural body that is very rare, whether birds, insects, fishes or the like, apt to putrify, decay with time, shall be painted in a fair velome folio book, either with watercolours, or at least designed in black and white by some good master.12Creating a visual record using painting to document the rapid transition in condition of an object or specimen was at the heart of similar attempts outside the museum context but made with a view to initiating an object into such an institutional system. Five years before the statutes were set down, in 1681, an abortive attempt was made to do just this when an elephant died in a fire in Dublin. A physician named Allen Mullen sent a letter to William Petty, a Fellow of the Royal Society, reporting that the owner of the elephant, Mr Wilkins, agreed to allow Mullen to take forward Wilkins' own idea of removing the elephant's partially damaged flesh to create an anatomical model from the skeleton. Mullen rallied some butchers for the task. But before this, he decided that 'the icons of each part should be taken in order by some painter, with whom upon this occasion I could prevail. But my endeavours proved fruitless because that about ten a clock that night, when we went to the shed, to find what condition the elephant was in, he emitted very noisome steams.'13The inclination to document, was, it seems, was not always matched with a willing draftsperson, especially when this meant convincing a painter to endure the stench of a decomposing and half-burnt elephant while the task was in hand.The papers here go some way towards redressing the imbalance of a nineteenth-century origin story for conservation history. The essays composing the conference panel entitled 'Change and revision as processes of preservation' reflected this theme through an examination of built heritage and portable works of art integrated into a decorative scheme. Costanza Beltrami's paper, the first of our issue, explores the stone-by-stone relocation of Segovia Cathedral's cloister, which was coupled with a completely new cathedral in a new location in Segovia's main square. Her research shows how the movement of the cloister was the first stage in the creation of the new cathedral and took place between 1524 and 1529—a relocation that did not save money or time. Juan Campero conducted this work, and though it seems likely that he marked the stones in some way in order to rebuild the cloister, such markings remain invisible.The possible motivations behind these decisions are complex and interrelated. Though it might seem the most obvious reason, the case for a contemporary aesthetic appreciation of the building is debatable. Beltrami's work shows how salvage and reuse was common at this date and that reuse had a moral and religious basis—a point that has resonance with Simon Werrett's paper about thrift and use. Although the cloister was moved stone by stone, it was demonstrated clearly that the end result was perhaps closer to a new building based on the older building than a faithful translation. Nonetheless, translation is perhaps a key word here because the important burials of the old cathedral were ultimately concentrated in the cloister and its chapel by 1558, and both the relics of Saint Fructus and the stones of the church were 'translated' across the town. Costanza Beltrami argues convincingly for a role of continuity, memory and commemoration imbued in the cloister connecting the old and new incarnations of the cathedral.Olivia Stoddart and Gerry Alabone's paper takes us to Thomas Sackville's Hall of Fame at Knole House in Kent. Their paper focuses on a set of nearly 50 portraits painted between 1605 and 1608, an intrinsic part of the decoration of the main gallery, which was later to become the Cartoon Gallery housing Raphael Cartoons. The portrait set included monarchs, courtiers, clergymen and military figures from Tudor and Jacobean times, based on standard portrait types and painted in England. The original function of the room, in which the portraits were an integrated part structurally, as well as visually, was to display the patron's political connections and ideologies to visitors to Knole House.The paper discusses the complex physical history of the panels—how, why and at what date they came to be displaced and repainted, added to and updated. It was made particularly clear that the original purpose of the paintings, effectively as painted panelling built into a room, had implications for their long-term preservation. This was due both to the panels' physical limitations in respect of structural framing and to the characteristics of the room itself, with a large open fireplace and south-side windows associated with damp conditions, which had led in the past to insect infestation.The paper focuses in particular on a fascinating recorded intervention by a London picture restorer called Francis Parsons. Parsons found the paintings already displaced from their original location—they had been moved in 1702—and he found them with significant structural problems and probably one existing restoration campaign. The authors meticulously reconstruct Parsons' work, determining that he undertook structural work before regilding and painting in a neoclassical style, and also suggesting that he did not work on the panels alone.Intrinsic flaws in the panels' original structure, caused by the engaged frames and the problematic conditions in which they were kept, prompted later structural restoration treatments. However, the portraits' survival as objects of interest seems also to have been predicated on Parson's aesthetic updates: a transition from fragments of a fitted Jacobean decorative interior into a hang of individual portraits in a neoclassical style and one to which more portraits were added in the eighteenth century.Giacomo Cardinali's work, the first paper appearing originally in a session dealing with treatment and innovation, focuses on novel techniques for the preservation of manuscripts in the mid-sixteenth century. He discusses the use of Cotinus coggygria, the smoke-bush or dyer's sumach, for the reviving or refreshing of faded writing in ink, especially the use of pre-treated leather patches or poultices soaked in a distillate derived from this tannin-rich plant as early as ca 1550. This was a method developed by Cardinal Marcello Cervini, using this plant. A letter written by Cervini to the Apostolic Nuncio in Venice, Ludovico Beccadelli, describes the method alongside the clear use of it from the damaging chemical reactions left on manuscripts from its use, specifically the shape of the chemically impregnated leather piece used. Notably, in the case of the manuscript Marc. gr. 179, this was specifically demonstrated not to have been done in the method customary in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which involved brushing the reagent onto the page, but using Cervini's more precise method.Giacomo Cardinali has tracked down the recipe in humanist Ulisse Aldrovandi's papers and also followed the connections to another recipient of the recipe, the philologist Gabriele Faerno from Cremona whom Cervini had appointed corrector Latinus of the Papal Library. Cardinali's archival and visual detective work resulted in the discovery of a trace of another piece of leather with the same browning effects on the page.In the third and final panel of the conference, on collections and specialists, Alice Limb focuses on the collection, treatment and display of oil sketches on paper produced in the context of the Carracci family's Accademia degli Incamminati. Three head studies of elderly male sitters, one in the costume of a Bishop, were collected by English gentry or their agents in Italy in the eighteenth century. Two of these were displayed in English country houses and one in Christ Church Picture Gallery in Oxford.Limb takes us through the seventeenth century functions of these works while in Italy, to their acquisition, conservation and display in the English context, looking at the trajectory of their change in use from a didactic function to an endpoint as a gallery painting. The sketches initially formed parts of artists' practice and planning, although those sketches retained are likely skewed towards the more competent end of production. Stock figures and character types could be used effectively in a studio to create affective art works. Evidence suggests that artists of the Carracci circle took sketches when they travelled to commissions, and the paper support, though cheap, was also portable. Initially, sketches stayed in networks of artists, inherited by assistants.Some of these drawings were lined onto canvas and mounted for display as early as the seventeenth century, the process being undertaken by artist owners. This was the case for Annibale Carracci's Urbino cartoon later owned, and likely adapted for display, by Carlo Maratti.Sketches were displayed alongside contemporary British paintings themselves mimicking the Italian academic tradition. The oil sketches' function was altered by an elevation to gallery painting status mainly through lining onto canvas or marouflaging onto panel and then framing, and through the use of cropping.14 The focus of this process was shown to differ in the eighteenth as opposed to the nineteenth century when large scale repainting of oil sketches to finish them became more common.William Burgess has contributed an insightful paper into the rhetoric of preservation in the eighteenth century with reference to the Cotton Library, eloquently and cleverly weaving the theme of his title 'Time's teeth' throughout his essay. The Library was gifted to the Crown in 1701 by John Cotton and contained nearly 1000 volumes of medieval texts. The stewardship of the Library from the time of its donation until a devastating fire in 1731 was characterized by a lack of resources which had seen the Cotton manuscripts kept in damp rooms. But the language around the Bibliotheca Cottoniana suggested a much grander and coherent vision of permanence and perpetuity. There was a dichotomy between the Library as a conceived coherent whole, a permanent collection, and its shifting, impermanent constituent elements, the vulnerable manuscripts, which even before the fire were not consistently catalogued and on whose survival experts could not agree precisely in the aftermath of the conflagration.The paper demonstrates the emergence of cyclical narratives of heroic recovery around the Cotton Library, a repeated dialectic of neglect and rescue from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth through generations of restorers and custodians, the dust and neglect providing the fertile conditions in which each generation's rescue could take place. This is a story all too resonant with contemporary fundraising narratives in many fields of conservation.Simon Werrett's important contribution brings together practices in the domestic sphere and the institutional collecting setting. He proposes that the values of domestic thrift, which encouraged virtuous, moral, religiously motivated acts of preservation through making the most of material possessions, inspired a culture of experimentation in seventeenth century England, which in turn had an impact on the preservation of art objects, or collected objects or 'bodies' as they were termed. 'Bodies' were described using the language of curing, and their defects and damage described variously as 'injury, derangement and bruising', clearly reflecting the language also adopted by Elias Ashmole to describe both his own physical ailments and the changing conditions of collected materials.Werrett's analysis of English early modern domestic preservation techniques demonstrates that acts of preservation led to acts of innovation and that preservation techniques were socio-material practices mixing material and moral concerns. Households would practise thrift through making best use of their possessions. This meant an emphasis on the prevention of damage, rather than remedial work, on repairs where necessary rather than replacement, on careful storage and use, and on cleaning—acts that could be highly gendered.These papers forge a much-needed path through the relatively uncharted history of restoration and conservation in the early modern period. Themes emerge and coalesce in these contributions, around cultural attitudes towards collecting and the rhetoric of preservation, around the interrelation of the moral and material, and about innovation in ideas and in preservation methods and techniques. In sum, this rich and careful research gives an account of the physical histories, functions and lifespans of buildings, objects and paintings. Together these papers highlight the importance of the historical paths along which 'bodies' as objects and buildings travel, and the particular need for the evidence of changes of form, function, use and context to be preserved through contemporary and future conservation decisions, and in our scholarly explorations of them.Data accessibilityThis article has no additional data.AcknowledgementsWe are very grateful to Anna Marie Roos, who assisted with developing ideas for the conference and has helped with this resulting publication. Thanks also go to Jennifer Kren and Tim Holt for working with us to produce this special issue of Notes and Records. The members of the Ashmolean Conservation Department have been a vital and generous source of friendship, encouragement, knowledge and assistance.Footnotes1 For example, see: Shabnam Yazdani Mehr, 'Analysis of 19th and 20th century conservation key theories in relation to contemporary adaptive reuse of heritage buildings', Heritage2, 920–937 (2019); Nicholas Stanley Price, M. Kirby Talley Jr and Alessandra Melucco Vaccaro (eds), Historical and philosophical issues in the conservation of cultural heritage (Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 1996); and F. G. Bewer, A laboratory for art: Harvard's Fogg Museum and the emergence of conservation in America, 1900–1950 (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2010).2 Harold Plenderleith, 'A history of conservation', Stud. Conserv.43, 129–143 (1998).3 Ibid., p. 130.4 R. F. Ovenell, The Ashmolean Museum, 1683–1894 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986), p. 21; Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (eds), The origins of museums: the cabinet of curiosities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2014), p. 152.5 R. F. Ovenell, The Ashmolean Museum, 1683–1894 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986), pp. 25–27. For Plot's search for a universal solvent see: Anna Marie Roos, 'The chymistry of "The Learned Dr Plot" (1640–96)', Osiris29, 83–85 (2014).6 See: Peter R. Anstey, 'Lockean self-diagnosis', Archimedes57, 125–137 (2020); and Anna Marie Roos, 'Treating yourself: self-diagnosis amongst natural philosophers and physicians and the early modern medical case study', Archimedes57, 169–192 (2020).7 R. T. Gunther (ed.), The diary and will of Elias Ashmole (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1927), pp. 8–9.8 Ibid., p. 9.9 Anon., 'Diary of Mr Elias Ashmole', Town Country Mag., February 1782, p. 92.10 Gunther (ed.), op. cit. (note 7), p. 42.11 Ibid., p. 149.12 Elias Ashmole, 'Statutes Orders and Rules for the Ashmolean Museum in the University of Oxford 1686', 1683–1687, AMS 1/1 [draft and copies], Ashmolean Museum Archives, Oxford.13 A. M. Mullen, An Anatomical Account of the Elephant accidentally burnt in Dublin, on Fryday June 17, in the year 1681. Sent in a letter to Sir Will. Petty, Fellow of Royal Society (Sam Smith at the Prince's Arms in St Paul's Church-Yard, London, 1682), pp. 5–7.14 Marouflage is the process of adhering a canvas or paper artwork onto a rigid support such as panel or wall.© 2021 The Author(s)Published by the Royal Society. Previous ArticleNext Article VIEW FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD PDF FiguresRelatedReferencesDetails This Issue20 June 2022Volume 76Issue 2A special issue 'Cabinet, Elaboratory, Gallery 1500–1800. The Preservation of Art and Material Culture in Europe' organized and guest edited by Morwenna Blewett Article InformationDOI:https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0079Published by:Royal SocietyPrint ISSN:0035-9149Online ISSN:1743-0178History: Published online08/12/2021Published in print20/06/2022 License:© 2021 The Author(s)Published by the Royal Society. Citations and impact PDF Download Subjectshistory of science archives