Temporary Liaison for Arts and Architecture
Digital Humanities Librarian
Among these Subject Guides, most needs for information about art history are best facilitated by the one titled Art and Architectural History. This much more specialized guide is intended to introduce advanced undergraduate and graduate students to a field of growing importance in the discipline: “technical art history” – studies of art employing a combination of scientific and documentary research to elucidate the history of artistic materials and processes. There is overlap between this field and “Digital Art History,” - the use of computing to facilitate art historical investigation - and that approach is covered by a separate Subject Guide.
Scientific methods have been employed in art history at least since the early 20th century, but primarily for the purpose of conserving or authenticating artworks. Technical art history employs those methods and others, with the broader goal of understanding the historical dynamics of making and meaning – of reconsidering art history from the perspective of materiality. Because of this lineage, many of the sources recommended here are from the literature of conservation. However, to maintain a manageable scope, architecture and it's historic preservation are not emphasized, nor are the many technologies unique to archaeology. This guide is a work in progress. Your suggestions are welcome.
Brief Overviews
These brief, scholarly sources summarize complex topics and recommend key readings:
- Tite, M.S., and others. “Technical Examination.” in Grove Art Online, 2009.Summarizes the potential outcomes of technical analysis of art objects (still grounded in the goals of conservation and authentication) and defines the most common technologies used and their capabilities. This is followed by the special considerations required for 8 media (stone, textiles, etc.) Separate recommended bibliographies follow each section of this excellent overview.
. - “Technical Art History.” In Wikipedia.This pretty-good Wikipedia entry serves as an update to the Oxford Art Online article on "Technical Examination" that acknowledges the broader and more open-ended goals of recent research. It also embraces both the lab-centered and text-centered approaches to the materials and processes of art.
. - Hermens, Erma. “Technical Art History: The Synergy of Art, Conservation and Science.” In Art History and Visual Studies in Europe Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, 151–65. Brill, 2012.This often-cited conference paper describes technical art history as an evolving synthesis of aesthetic, social, and scientific perspectives, with origins in the 17th and 18th centuries. While recognizing the field's current goals of "an in-depth interpretation of art,” most of the examples provided relate to conservation and connoisseurship.
. - Fowler, Caroline. “Technical Art History as Method.” Art Bulletin 101, no. 4 (December 2019): 8–17.In this historiographic article, Fowler describes points of separation and linkage between theories of art history and those of conservation, concluding that "the history of conservation is not peripheral, and technical art history offers more than a mode of connoisseurship." Writers such as historian Alois Riegl and conservator Cesare Brandi are discussed as important methodological links.
. - Anderson, Christy, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H. Smith. “Introduction.” In The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250 - 1750, 1–17. Manchester University Press, 2015.The first half of this introduction to a collection of essays charts a different historiography with a focus on materiality -- discussing anthropological and philosophic theories of the relationships between people and objects, with some emphasis on the thinking of Bruno Latour, Gaston Bachelard, and Adrian Stokes. It also notes some art-historical precursors to the current material turn including Julius von Schlosser, Michael Baxandall, subsequent writers on material culture methods, and others.
. - Mass, Jennifer. “Scientific Examination and Provenance Research: Using Science to Resolve Questions of Provenance, Identity and False Attribution.” In: Provenance Research Today : Principles, Practice, Problems, 68-84. Lund Humphries, 2020.This essay, in a collection surveying the issues and methods of provenance research, categorizes five scientific methods used to authenticate art works or historic documents. It also discusses contextual “identity challenges” (typical changes over time) that influence the assessment of an individual object.
. - Ward, Gerald W. R., ed. The Grove Encyclopedia of Materials and Techniques in Art. Oxford University Press, 2008.This is merely a subset of information that can be found online in Oxford Art Online but is useful for browsing the relevant entries and also as a substantive (825-page) reminder of the wealth of authoritative summaries and bibliographies to be found in OAO. Entries on media, processes, people, substances, and more.
Example Projects
Here are two convenient examples of projects combining documentary and lab approaches to technical art history:
- “Making and Knowing Project – Intersections of Craft Making and Scientific Knowing.”This model project at Columbia University has produced, over 6 years, a transcription, translation, and critical edition of an important French, 16th-century manuscript discussing techniques and materials for arts and crafts. The research team pairs this historical research with lab experiments that replicate and further elucidate the processes of the past. Not entirely focused on art but with much arts and crafts content. Extensive critical commentary and videos add ample context - often beyond 16th-century France.
. - ARTECHNE - Technique in the Arts, 1500-1950: Concepts, Practices, Expertise.This research center is a collaboration of several Dutch institutions to collect historic recipes of artists and crafts people and pair that data with ongoing laboratory research. See especially their database described in this guide under DOCUMENTARY SOURCES.