SECOND INTERNATIONAL HARVARD CONFERENCE ON INTERNET & SOCIETY may 26-29, 1998
Harvard Art Museums' Web Site Details Restoration Techniques
Press Release from the Harvard Art Museumshttp://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu
Cambridge, April 1998—Visitors to the Harvard University Art Museums' Web site can now see how digital imaging techniques and technical examinations are used to study paintings.
The information provided on the site was first introduced to the public through a unique and highly interactive computer display installed in the Fogg Art Museum last spring as part of the ongoing exhibition Investigating the Renaissance.
"The award-winning display has been popular with our visitors," said James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the University Art Museums. "We are very excited that the valuable information provided in the display is now accessible to students, scholars, and the general public without having to physically visit the museum." Funds for the project were provided by the Getty Grant Program.
Site Wins Award
The original computer display, created by Ron Spronk, research associate for technical studies at the Art Museums' Straus Center for Conservation, and Robin Marlowe, programming specialist who designed the user interface, received the Silver Award at the INVISION Festival this past November in San Francisco.
The new site, www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/Renaissance addresses a variety of material aspects of three Early Netherlandish paintings using digital imaging technology. The featured works are The Virgin and Child from the workshop of Dirck Bouts, The Portrait of a Man by the Master of the 1540s, and The Last Judgment by Jan Provoost.
Visitors can examine and compare the artists' painting techniques by viewing details of each painting. The site shows a sequence of images documenting the recent cleaning of The Virgin and Child. Methods of technical examination such as X-radiography and infrared reflectography are described and related images of the three paintings are used to illustrate the importance of these methods to conservators and art historians. Through an innovative use of imaging software, infrared reflectograms, X-radiographs, and ultraviolet photographs are superimposed with the visible light images within a single image. The layers can be viewed sequentially or simultaneously to reveal, for example, relationships between the initial sketch or underdrawing, the finished work and compositional changes within the paint layers. Visitors to the site can themselves manipulate these layered images to look beneath the surface of a painting.
Visitors Take a Virtual Tour
According to Henry Lie, director of the Straus Center, "In addition to making our examination of documents fun to use, these virtual tours through the layers of a painting offer a faster and inherently more detailed means of comparing different types of information. We expect this technique will eventually become routine in studying and documenting the complexities of important paintings."
"Being able to study the correlation of a painting's surface with its underdrawing and under-painting in high magnification on your own computer screen is a dream for the art historian interested in examining actual works of art," said Spronk. "We will, of course, never be able to bridge the historical distance between us and the painters whose works we study, but it is fascinating to be granted a peek over their shoulders."