The papers in this volume focus on the exploration of artists' practice found in the evidence recorded in visual and written documents, treatises, manuals, correspondence, ledgers, diaries and journals, paintings, drawings, cartoons, prints, photographs, as well as from the testimony of collections of pigments. Early accounts are compared to the latest analytical findings, and past deductions about art technology are questioned and critically assessed.
Topics include: techniques used by 15th-century Romanian illuminators and early modern printers; documentary evidence on the use of moulds in the production of tin relief work from the 13th to the 16th century; a discussion of 'impossible recipes' from medieval times; the making of colours and special-use inks by scribes; an evaluation of the sources for the Strasbourg manuscript family; a comparison between Rubens' retouching practice as described in contemporary sources, eye witness accounts and the paintings themselves; a training manual for the later 18th-century Spanish military cadet; Oudry's lectures on painting technique to the French Royal Academy; Vigani's 18th-century cabinet containing 80 organic and 90 inorganic art materials; the 19th-century Austrian artist Kupelweiser's extensive sketches for a monumental fresco; James McNeill Whistler's use of memory drawing; a study of materials from a late 19th-century Persian workshop of the master potter Ali Muhammad Isfahani; and contemporary art practice as described in artists' interviews, notebooks and diaries.
This publication is a collection of papers from the third symposium of the Art Technological Source Research Working Group held in 2008.
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Virtues and vices in late medieval art productions: the painter's progress to hell
Manfred Lautenschlager
Codicological indicators of practical medieval artists' recipes
Mark Clarke
Impossible recipes
Spike Bucklow
Romanian handbooks on manuscript illumination in the 18th century
Marta Ursescu and Sorin Ciovica
Art for war: washing materials and techniques in Spanish military mapmaking
Stefanos Kroustallis
Copper pigments in medieval times: green, blue, greenish-blue or bluish-green?
Catarina Miguel, Ana Claro, João A. Lopes and Maria João Melo
Documentary sources for the use of moulds in the production of tin relief: cause and effect
Jilleen Nadolny
Writing recipes for non-specialists c.1300: the Anglo-Latin Secretum philosophorum, Glasgow MS Hunterian 110
Mark Clarke
Comparative analysis of painting recipes: a new contribution to the study of the texts of the Strasbourg family
Sylvie Neven
Images of copper engravers and plate printers in their workshops 1545-1645: 'One picture tells more than a thousand words'
Ad Stijnman
Fine art materials in Vigani's cabinet (1704) at Queens' College, Cambridge
Lisa Wagner
The master's own hand? Contribution to the study of Rubens' retouching of monumental formats
Hélène Dubois
Oudry's painted menagerie: a technical study with reference to the artist's lectures on painting technique
Alan Phenix, Tiarna Doherty, Anna Schönemann and Adriana Rizzo
Studying the artistic process: Kupelwieser's fresco series History of Austria
Sigrid Eyb-Green, Wolfgang Baatz and Werner Kitlitschka
En plein soleil: Whistler, nature and memory
Erma Hermens and Margaret F. MacDonald
'To acquire a good name': specimens of 19th-century Persian tile-making from the Tehran workshop of the master potter Ali Muhammad Isfahani
Lore Troalen, Ina Reiche, Stefan Röhrs, Boris Pretzel, Lucia Burgio, Bhavesh Shah, Stéphane Peschard, Clotilde Boust, Jim Tate, Graham Martin and Friederike Voigt
À la recherche du pigment perdu: a project on less well-known 19th-century pigments
Hartmut Kutzke and Doris Oltrogge
Technique and process in the papers of David Smith
Richard Mulholland
Challenging the material: artists' interview as a documentary source in the 1980s and 1990s
Paivi Kyllonen-Kunnas
Shorter papers from poster presentations
Study of materials and techniques used in a 15th-century Romanian illuminated manuscript
Ileana Zizi Balta, Gheorghe Niculescu, Irina Petroviciu, Bruno Brunetti, Laura Cartechini, Francesca Rosi, Brenda Doherty, Alessandro Sassolini, Mihai Lupu and Ileana Cretu
Tracing the history of wall paintings through visual documents: the vault painting of the main hall at Verdala Palace, Malta
Theodora Fardi, Roberta De Angelis, Bernadine Scicluna and Daniel Vella
Study of a Portuguese 18th-century manuscript
Ana Freitas, Ana Claro, Maria João Melo, Conceição Casanova and Laura Moura
De/re-constructing Turner for research projects at Tate
Joyce H. Townsend, Jacob Thomas, Charlotte Caspers, Monserrat Pis Marcos, Anna Brookes, Bronwyn Ormsby, Stephen Hackney and Andrew Lerwill
The archives of Blockx, an Antwerp family of chemist-colourmen, founded 1865
Brian Dudley Barrett
Reviews
Individually the papers provide great and varied insights into art technological sources of all types and I look forward to the outcomes of the next ATSR symposium 'Technology and Interpretation - Reflecting the Artist's Process'...
The Picture Restorer 37 (Autumn 2010) 51-52
"Sources and Serendipity. Testimonies of Artists’ Practice" integra interesantes contribuciones sobre la práctica artísitica de diferentes periodos y especialidades, tanto a partir de fuentes escritas (tratados y manuales, correspondencia, libros de cuentas, diarios y periódicos…) como visuales (pinturas, grabados, fotografías, película…)…La variedad de temas y el rigor de los estudios presentados convierten a esta publicación, de igual modo que las otras de la serie, en una referencia bibliográfica imprescindible para la sumergirse en el estudio de la tecnología del arte.
Ge-conservación/conservação 1 (2010) 272-274
This compilation of articles is essential reading - and not only for the wealth of specific information that the papers contain about techniques in a variety of media...[Above] all, the work of ATSR is extremely important as a source of inspiration - at this critical moment in the development of the field of technical art history - that we can (in fact, must) be as rigorous and thoughtful in our use of sources as scholars in other branches of art history.
Studies in Conservation 56 (2011) 76-77