FEATS OF EXPERTS

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 97, 21 October 1936, Page 20

FEATS OF EXPERTS

MUSEUM MAGICIANS

PRESERVING AND RESTORING

MUCH PATIENT WORK

Bejiind the mask of utter . stillness breathes the living countenance of the art museum. Pulsating with a vitality of which the public can see no evidence, the work of the restorer goes 'on in those . concealed chambers 1 guarded against obtrusion by "No Admittance" signs (says the "Christian Science Monitor"). "Restorer" is a humble and rather general designation accepted by scholarly individuals who read the messages of Cheops and Rameses II as readily as the commuter reads his railway signs; who know the hand of the Greek potter responsible for a certain type of ancient amphora; who recognise the brush of Leonardo da Vinci in a fold of drapery. To sueh v as these go the laurels for producing from a shoyelful of dirt a priceless vase of alabaster, for erecting from limestone fragments the full figure of some Pharaoh who ruled Egypt 4000 years, ago, for revealing in its. original .glory .some Renaissance panel long obscured by the overpainting of a later, more artifiical, school. THE METALWORKERS' ART. Reverent before the wonders which are already being wrought through the co-opefation of artist and scientist, the student holds his breath as the infinite possibilities of discovery suggest themselves. Cleaning off the corroding incrustation of centuries from a Chinese bronze is a performance to admire, but when exuded particles of the base metal resume of their, own accord their original ■ position, that is something to exclaim about. Electrolysis alone, according to Mr. W. J. Young, an expert restorer at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, reconditioned an important piece of Egyptian silverware, a strainer from Meroe, of the period 300 B.C. to 350 A.D., acquired.a few years ago. Treasures of the early metalworker's art —silver, bronze,, copper vessels fashioned as far. back as 945 B;C— form only a section of the vast collection submitted over a course, of years to the workshop of Mr. Young, who in. a way, was apprenticed to his profession, under his father, noted English restorer of classical antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Like other restorers in the art museums of the world, he finds it essential to have a rather thorough knowledge of many branches of the arts and sciences, of the styles of sculpture, carving, architecture; ceramics, metalwork, and painting; of chemistry, s physics, and subjects involving the employment of monochromatic lights, ultra-violet rays, and photo-electricity. A VARIETY OF WORK. The visitor to his department is usually impressed by the~variety of work going on there. When I called (says. the. American writer Dr. Pearl P. Strachari), two headless limestone statues, unearthed by the Harvard'XJni-versity-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition, at Gizeh, occupied the middle of the room. Received in fragments, they had been reconstructed with such skill that all the idiom of Egyptian, sculpture of the period had been preserved. Portions of an Egyptian steel, also from Gizeh, were being fitted together on a bench and the carved lines of a throne beginning to take shape in the process...promised an interesting court scene upon completion. Rather special knowledge of Egyptian, anatomy—a very different and less naturalistic concept than the Greek—is required in conducting this work. A formless object, thickly encrusted with the so-called "bronze disease," lay ready to be bound wtih copper wire and suspended, for a.time, in one of the baihs" -of alkaline solution forming the "laundry" equipment .of the workshop. Bronze pieces, badly corroded; were about to be tested by Mr. Young in a steriliser. This piece of equipment,' once adapted by the museum for kitchen use, was readapted by him to form a test chamber for determining the survival, if any, of the bronze disease after the piece has undergone the1 usual laboratory treatment. THE TEST OF A CURE. By leaving the object, previously treated, in the chamber at a regulated humidity and temperature he is able to determine whether the malady has been entirely dispelled. Previously the piece after treatment was returned to the exhibition case, where it was necessary .to watch it over a period of years; lest the .pondition recur. In an enormous oven, in one corner of the room, like irregular ginger cookies on. a tin, potsherds of ancient Greece were undergoing a process whereby the heat of, the oven removed brown fire stains acquired by burning centuries ago, in some funereal conflagration or hostile invasion of a town,- and restored to their original terra cotta colour, with' black decoration, the fragments which would later be assembled into a vase. Under the.ultra-violet ray, in a dark chamber adjoining, an area added in restoration to a Chinese glazed bowl, the restoration being invisible- to the naked eye, glow,ed in unmistakable, greenish luminescence, while the genuinely ancient part of the vessel assumed the intense purple of the detecting ray. In this room, too, the percentage of copper, lead, tin, manganese, sulphide, oxide, and other elements is determined through analysis by use of the spectograph. This modern method requires only an infinitesimal chip from the object to be'analysed and therefore is no disturbance of its form. Different metals and different salts volatilise in different wavelengths. Knowledge of the composition makes all the difference in the world in treatment and lifts the task out of the experimental field. RESTORED SCULPTURES. The great alabaster statue of King Mycerinus, which greets the visitor on entering the galleries of the Egyptian Department, is one of the outstanding pieces of restored Sculpture in the Boston Museum. Only the head, a portion of the torso, and the shoulders could be found by Professor Reisner, in the excavation near the funerary temple of the Third Pyramid, Joseph Lindon Smith, honorary curator of the department, undertook, some years ago, to model in plaster the chief missing parts, including the chest, right shoulder, and upper thighs. To Charles Muskavitch, at a later date,- was entrusted the work of modelling the arms and-feet, basing.such work on preliminary study of related royal sculptures of the .period. The added portions are easy to distinguish, for museum restoration never attempts to deceive. There is always a difference made in the colour of later additions, the idea being merely to present something which is optically harmonious and which relates original parts. One of the most important contributions to the world of painting to be made during recent years has been the discovery of X-ray. Works which for long have lain in museum storerooms, under a cloud of suspicion, are now in a position either to vindicate their claims of authorship or reveal themselves as impostors. The Louvre labor.ator⁢ isi--repotted*, in addition, SLO.

making a chemical investigation, now subjects a picture to a treble study: (a) An examination in various monochromatic lights, (b) a test by ultraviolet ray, (c) analysis of the hues radiated by various pigments. The red used by a certain Dutch painter, for example, will, in the hue analysis, be represented by a curve of definite shape, while that used by a modern painter, which may appear to be the same, .will "take--a. different colour curve i