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This book traces the development of scientific conservation and technical art history. It takes as its starting point the final years of the nineteenth century which saw the establishment of the first museum laboratory in Berlin and groundbreaking international conferences on art history and conservation held in pre-World War I Germany. It follows the history of conservation and art history until the 1940s when, from the ruins of World War II, new institutions such as the Istituto Centrale del Restauro emerged, which would shape the post-war art and conservation world. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, conservation history, historiography, and history of science and humanities

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses how major conferences from the Munich Exhibition and Congress in 1893 to the first international conference on the scientific analysis of art in Rome in 1930 shaped a research community around the study of materials and techniques and issues of conservation. It shows how scientific expertise developed in the newly established museum laboratories and how new imaging technologies, such as X-rays, were used and contested in court rooms. The book focuses on the conference and exhibition organised by the German Society for the Promotion of Rational Painting Methods in 1893 to scrutinise the fight over expertise in matters of painting materials between artists and scientists which would haunt the conflict between Alexander Eibner and Max Doerner. It focuses on the Rijksmuseum provides people with an interesting contrast.

Pipe organs have always reflected the artisanal knowledge and skills of their makers. Since the 1990s, replicating historical instruments has opened new ways of studying practices of knowledge and making that revolve around historical organs. In this chapter, we argue that the idea of how a pipe should sound always involves a certain degree of reenactment of the building process. We follow the history of explicating concepts of sound, from one of the most prominent sources for organ builders and reconstructors written by the 18th-century monk Bédos de Celles via an explication of why sound was not centrally discussed in sources before the mid-19th century up to the historically informed pipe making and voicing by Japanese organ builder Munetaka Yokota.

Artisanal textual practices are strategies to deal with the uncertainty of artisanal processes and the whims of materials. Confronted with the precarious nature of artisanal knowledge, variation had always been the most important strategy of error management. Following the dissatisfaction with ways of writing down knowledge, hiding the imperfection of the process of knowledge production and in response to the limits of language in articulating skills, the codification of error emerged as a new strategy in the seventeenth century, pointing to a new conception of the epistemic value of failure and error in the early modern arts and sciences.

Performative methods in archaeology provide a valuable heuristic tool for investigating the many behaviours and interactions of both producers and consumers of material culture. Focusing on the potter’s wheel at Bronze Age Akrotiri as a socially embedded performance of technical know-how, this chapter outlines an integrated approach to material engagement across three arenas of archaeological action – experiment, analysis, and visualisation – connected by an explicit engagement with the chaîne opératoire approach. An innovative tool-kit is presented for the investigation of this technology by the wider archaeological community. Given the large-scale regional and diachronic questions that the adoption and adaptation of ancient technologies can raise, a collective approach is proposed for the interpretation of the potter’s wheel.

espanolEn su estudio fundacional, Las tecnicas del observador (1990), Jonathan Crary postula que una historia de la vision o de la percepcion “depende mucho mas que de una simple enumeracion de cambios o desplazamientos de las practicas representacionales […]. La vision y sus efectos son siempre inseparables de las posibilidades de un sujeto observador, que es a la vez un producto historico y el lugar de ciertas practicas, tecnicas, instituciones, y procedimientos de subjetivacion”. Asi, en las decadas de 1810 y 1820, Crary situa una ruptura del regimen escopico entre un modelo de vision geometrico y un modelo fisiologico. Este articulo defiende que un abordaje metodologico enfocado en la materialidad de las tecnologias visuales revela que en la modernidad temprana (es decir, antes del siglo XIX) la observacion dependia de un involucramiento y un entrecruzamiento corporeo, mas que de una division estricta entre sujeto y objeto. La palabra clave en tal aproxi-macion es movilidad, que actua sobre tres niveles: 1) la movilidad y la animacion de las imagenes; 2) la materialidad movil de los instrumentos, y 3) la movilidad en terminos de la portabilidad de las tecnologias visuales a lo largo de diferentes sitios y continentes. EnglishIn his seminal Techniques of the Observer (1990), Jonathan Crary argues hat a history of vision or perception “depends on far more than an account of shifts in representational practices […]. Vision and its effects are always inseparable from the possibilities of an observing subject who is both the historical product and the site of certain practic-es, techniques, institutions, and procedures of subjectification”. Crary identifies a rupture in the scopic regime between geometric and physiological models of vision that took place in the 1810s and 1820s. This paper argues that the adoption of a methodological approach which focuses on the materiality of visual technologies reveals that in the early modern period (i.e., prior to the early nineteenth century) observation depended upon bodily engagement rather than a strict division between the subject and the object. The keyword of such an approach is mobility which plays out on three levels: 1) the mobility and animation of images; 2) the mobile materiality of instruments, and 3) mobility in terms of the portability of visual technologies across different sites and continents.

The application of 3D techniques and digital methodologies in visualization is by no means new for Archaeology, but relatively new to other disciplines, like heritage studies, museology, conservation and restoration, and (art)-history. This chapter focuses on the understanding of ancient built structures, taking the famous courtyard building (Zone F) from the 6th century BC in Aquarossa, Italy, as a starting point. When the path that leads to the final (3D) reconstruction of material objects, however small, monumental or intangible, is thoroughly documented, it generates a vast amount of new data otherwise never encountered. It is these data that we want to use to understand fully the concept of reconstructing ancient and historical communities.

Against the background of the continuity and the longevity of the learned inquiry of stones stretching back from the early modern period to Antiquity, I arguethat global trade and the use of stones in art transformed the science of stones circa 1600.

The new field of the history of knowledge is often presented as a mere expansion of the history of science. We argue that it has a greater ambition. The re-definition of the historiographical domain of the history of knowledge urges us to ask new questions about the boundaries, hierarchies, and mutual constitution of different types of knowledge as well as the role and assessment of failure and ignorance in making knowledge. These issues have pertinence in the current climate where expertise is increasingly questioned and authority seems to lose its ground. Illustrated with examples from recent historiography of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, we indicate some fruitful new avenues for research in the history of knowledge. Taken together, we hope that they will show that the history of knowledge could build the expertise required by the challenges of twenty-first century knowledge societies, just like the history of science, throughout its development as a discipline in the twentieth century, responded to the demands posed by science and society.

The discussion of the differing practices of mathematical practitioners’ appropriation of the optical tradition in this essay brings out a variety among mathematical practitioners and within the tradition of practical mathematics. This diversity is difficult to grasp in accounts of practical mathematics which oppose theory and practice as mutually exclusive categories. Comparing the optical projects of two geographically and socially differentiated mathematicians, the Venetian physician and mathematician Ettore Ausonio and the English town councilman and volunteer gunner, William Bourne , this essay argues that mathematical practitioners’ appropriation of optical knowledge depended upon the complexities of personal and local contexts, such as the perception of patronage opportunities. Notwithstanding the cognitive similarities of their optical projects, the balance of theory and practice is different in the presentation of their shared knowledge. Ausonio’ s practical optics, which aimed at the design of an instrument by offering a theoric, is contrasted with Bourne’ s project for the making of a telescope, which lacked any attempt at a theoric. The essay shows that, rather than as an established category, practical optics should be understood as the result of a construction by Renaissance mathematical practitioners’ appropriations of the perspectivist optical tradition.

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