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The papers in this volume, presented at the conference Conservation in the Nineteenth Century, suggest that we should not think of the nineteenth century as a time solely marked by conservation activities that should be criticised, but as an interesting confluence of various attitudes out of which modern conservation trends emerged.
The conservation profession has its roots in the intellectual movements of the first half of the 19th century, following the Enlightenment. Scholarly study of objects made available by important archeological excavations and discoveries gave birth to the first debates on theoretical issues of preservation. Also the political events which disrupted Europe in the first decades of the 19th century played a significant role in conservation practice. In particular, Napoleon’s appropriation of works of art. As much as early conservation treatments can create many problems for conservators today, in some cases, they did prolong the life of an object that might not exist today. In some of these treatments we can see the interest in scientific methods that comprise the foundation of current conservation treatments. Nineteenth century technical inventions brought about by the industrial revolution led to the mass production of many materials. These have had both a positive and negative influence on conservation.
Here is an unashamedly handsome publication: hard-backed, generously illustrated and, would you know, typeset in Suffolk and printed and bound in Devon. A home-grown product if you're a UK-based reader. So what, you ask? Well, for this reader, and reviewer, it matters. It matters that beautiful specialist books (on acid-free paper) continue to be produced, and without any apparent corner-cutting. [...]
It's that emphasis on getting to grips with nineteenth-century reasoning that makes dipping into this volume so rewarding, as every paper contains nugget after nugget. [...] These scholarly papers are revelatory reference material for conservators at all stages of our working lives and contribute significantly to our understanding of our professional antecedents.
— ICON News - July 2014
Introduction
Acknowledgements
Interpreting historical conservation terminology: ‘cleaning’ paintings in Dutch eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources
Mireille te Marvelde
Art, science and painting restoration in Napoleonic Italy, 1796–98
Cathleen Hoeniger
Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin in Milan and the restoration by Giuseppe Molteni (1858)
Giorgio Bonsanti
A higher reality, born of the mind: notes for a philosophy of transfer
Matthew Hayes
Richard Redgrave (1804–1888): first curator of paintings at the South Kensington Museum
Nicola Costaras
Charles Chapuis: Degas’ ‘picture doctor’ and painting restoration at the end of the nineteenth century
Ann Hoenigswald
Il Manuale by Giovanni Secco Suardo: its impact on the development of conservation and restoration in the nineteenth century
Bettina Achsel
The conservation of polychromy on mediaval sculptures in Belgium in the nineteenth century and its perception by the Royal Monuments Commission of the time
Delphine Steyaert
The search for an enduring painting technique: Franz Fernbach and his encaustic technique as a restoration procedure for wall-paintings in the early nineteenth century
Barbara Beckett
Jacob Kornerup and the conservation of wall-paintings in nineteenth-century Denmark
Susanne Ørum and Isabelle Brajer
Documentation of medieval wall-paintings in Denmark and Germany in the nineteenth century and its impact on conservation and contemporaneous art
Isabelle Brajer, Ursula Schädler-Saub and Susanne Ørum
Bonnardot’s Essai: a nineteenth-century restoration manual and its author
Christopher Sokolowski
The test of time: nineteenth-century innovations in paper fibre analysis
Debora D. Mayer
Restoration of flat textiles: ideological framework, ideas and treatment methods in Sweden before 1900
Maria Brunskog and Johanna Nilsson
Documentary and material evidence of nineteenth-century interventions on musical instruments of the collection of the Musée de la musique in Paris
Jean-Philippe Echard, Justine Provino, Thierry Maniguet, Christine Laloue, Joël Dugot, Stéphane Vaiedelich
The restoration and conservation of the bronze Apollo Saettante from Pompeii
Erik Risser and David Saunders
Precision and mastery: identifying the work of Raffaele Gargiulo on four Apulian vases
Marie Svoboda
Preservation of prehistoric objects in Denmark, 1807–32
Helge Brinch Madsen and Jan Holme Andersen