Art Museums' Website Now Shows Techniques for Studying
Paintings
Visitors to the 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.
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.
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 underpainting 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."
Copyright
1998 President and Fellows of Harvard College
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