̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Spike Bucklow

Illuminating art’s history

sc604 — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 06:00:00 +0000

Faced with the prospect of his rapidly approaching nuptials on 29 October 1442, and with no wedding gift purchased for his bride-to-be, Francis I of Brittany (1414–1450) did what many of us have done at some point: he ‘re-gifted’. He took something that was already in his possession and gave it to someone else.

But this was no ordinary gift: it was an illuminated manuscript, made for Francis’ first wife, Yolande of Anjou, who had died in 1440. Francis had it altered and presented it to his new bride, Isabella Stuart, daughter of James I. ̽��ֱ��portrait of his first wife was covered with that of Isabella and an image of St Catherine was added, using cheaper pigments. Then, when Francis was made a duke, the portrait was painted over yet again to give Isabella a coronet.

Art historians have written volumes on the Hours of Isabella Stuart over the last century, but a cross-disciplinary Cambridge project is using a variety of imaging techniques to uncover this story of re-gifting. ̽��ֱ��team’s work is challenging previous assumptions about this and many other manuscripts, helping them to see and understand medieval painting and illumination in new and unexpected ways.

Combining research in the arts, humanities, sciences and technology, MINIARE (Manuscript Illumination: Non-Invasive Analysis, Research and Expertise) currently focuses on uncovering the secrets of medieval art, but it is anticipated that many of the imaging techniques they are adapting may be used to study other types of art, from a range of different periods.

̽��ֱ��project is led by Dr Stella Panayotova, Keeper of Manuscripts and Printed Books at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and Professor Stephen Elliott of the Department of Chemistry, who are working with colleagues from across the ̽��ֱ�� and around the world.

“Working in a truly cross-disciplinary way can benefit art history, scientific research and visual culture in general, while pushing technology forward at the same time,” said Panayotova. “Thanks to the imaging techniques we’ve been using, we can see things in these manuscripts that we couldn’t see before.”

Much of what we know about illuminated manuscripts comes from art-historical analysis and circumstantial evidence. Since they are so delicate and the layers of pigment are so thin, manuscripts are seriously compromised by taking samples, which is common practice for the analysis of panel or fresco paintings. To gather hard evidence about how these manuscripts were made, while preserving them, non-invasive techniques are required.

“For our team, it was about finding new applications for existing techniques, and pushing them far beyond current boundaries in order to analyse the very thin layers of a manuscript,” said Elliott. “Part of our research is in the area of medical diagnostics and environmental sensing, where we analyse materials in very thin layers, which is not so different from analysing a painting. So we could certainly see what the problems were.”

Using a combination of imaging techniques, including photomicroscopy, visible and infrared imaging at multiple wavelengths, reflectance imaging spectroscopy and optical coherence tomography, the MINIARE team is able to peer through the layers of a painting to uncover its history, as in the case of the Hours of Isabella Stuart.

“We do have to adapt conventional analytical techniques to make them safe to use on something as fragile as an illuminated manuscript,” said conservation scientist Dr Paola Ricciardi. “For instance, Raman spectroscopy is a brilliant technique, but it’s a challenge to use it on a manuscript as we tend to use one-hundredth of the laser power that we would on a less fragile object.”

̽��ֱ��technological challenge for the MINIARE team is making sure the imaging technology is non-invasive enough to keep the manuscript safe, but still sensitive enough to get an accurate result. Many of the imaging tools that the team use are in fact not cameras, but scanners that acquire a spectrum at each point as they scan an entire object. ̽��ֱ��resulting ‘spectral image cubes’ can then provide information about the types of materials that were used, as well as the ability to see different layers present in the manuscript.

Combining these non-invasive imaging techniques not only helps the researchers to distinguish between artists by analysing which materials they used and how they employed them, but also helps them to learn more about the technical know-how that these artists possessed.

“Many of the artists we’re looking at didn’t just work on manuscripts,” said Panayotova. “Some of them were panel painters or fresco painters, while others also worked in glass, textiles or metal. Identifying the ways in which they used the same materials in different media, or transferred materials and techniques across media, offers a whole new way of looking at art.”

For example, Ricciardi has found evidence for the use of smalt, a finely ground blue glass, as a pigment in an early 15th-century Venetian manuscript made in Murano. ̽��ֱ��use of a glass-based pigment is not unexpected given the proximity of the Murano glass factories, but this illuminator was working half a century before any other Venetian easel painter whose works are known to contain smalt.

Another unexpected material that the MINIARE team has encountered is egg yolk, which was a common paint binder for panel paintings, but not recommended for manuscript illumination – instead, egg white or gum were normally used. By making a hyperspectral reflectance map of the manuscript, the researchers were able to gather information about the pigments and binders, and determine that some manuscript painters were most likely working across a variety of media.

̽��ֱ��techniques that the team are developing and refining for manuscripts will also see application in other types of art. “All of the imaging techniques we’re using on the small scale of medieval manuscripts need to be scalable, in order that we can apply them to easel paintings and many other types of art,” said Dr Spike Bucklow of the Hamilton Kerr Institute. “It’s an opportunity to see how disciplines relate to each other.”

MINIARE (www.miniare.org) involves the Fitzwilliam Museum, Hamilton Kerr Institute, Departments of Chemistry, Physics, History of Art, History and Philosophy of Science, and Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, as well as the Victoria & Albert Museum, Durham ̽��ֱ��, Nottingham Trent ̽��ֱ��, Antwerp ̽��ֱ��, Getty Conservation Institute, J Paul Getty Museum, National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and SmartDrive Ltd.

Inset image – top: Macroscopic X-ray fluorescence imaging has allowed to prove the presence of smalt, a cobalt-containing glass pigment, mixed with ultramarine blue in selected areas of this early 15th century manuscript fragment painted by the Master of the Murano gradual; Left: Fitzwilliam Museum, Marlay Cutting It 18; Right: Cobalt distribution map; Credit: S. Legrand and K. Janssens, Department of Chemistry, ̽��ֱ�� of Antwerp.

Inset image – bottom: Hyperspectral reflectance imaging in the visible and near-infrared range confirms evidence for the use of egg yolk as a paint binder only in figurative areas within the decorated initials in the Missal of Cardinal Angelo Acciaiuoli, painted in Florence ca. 1404; Left: Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 30, fol 1r (detail); Centre: RGB composite obtained from the hyperspectral image cube; Right: egg yolk distribution map, showing its use to paint the figure of Christ with the exclusion of his ultramarine blue robe; Credit: J. K. Delaney and K. Dooley, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

Scientific imaging techniques are uncovering secrets locked in medieval illuminated manuscripts – including those of a thrifty duke.

Identifying the ways in which they used the same materials in different media, or transferred materials and techniques across media, offers a whole new way of looking at art

Stella Panayotova

Fitzwilliam Museum

Francis I of Brittany 'regifted' the Book of Hours to his second wife Isabella after having his first wife painted over

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Bejewelled backdrop to coronations did not cost a king’s ransom

sjr81 — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 10:38:01 +0000

Cambridge conservation scientist Spike Bucklow uncovered the knock-down cost of the 1260 AD ‘Westminter Retable’ while researching his latest book ‘Riddle of the Image’, which delves into the materials used in medieval works of art.

Commissioned by Henry III during the construction of Westminster Abbey, the altarpiece’s use of fake gemstones is already well documented. However, what has not been known until now is just how little the king would have paid for the Retable, the oldest known panel painting in England.

Using centuries-old records of accounts from Westminster Abbey, Bucklow was able to determine prices for the amount of wood used, the area of glass needed, each pigment of paint, and the wages the carpenters and painters were paid. This information was combined with practice-based research into the Retable whilst it was being restored at the Hamilton Kerr Institute.

“This is bargain basement stuff, it was all dirt cheap,” he said. “While some of the other objects in Riddle of the Image would have been cost the same as a farm or country home, the Westminster Abbey altarpiece would have cost no more than eight cows or about £5 in 13th century money.

“Historians have often thought that a financially constrained Henry was cutting corners, but you don’t spend as much as he did on the rest of the Abbey and then cut corners on the most visual and most important area for the crowning of monarchs.”

Rather than penny-pinching to preserve pounds, crowns and shillings, Bucklow believes that Henry III deliberately chose cheap materials and fake gemstones to accentuate one of the key themes of the altarpiece – miraculous transformations.

“It is no coincidence that all three surviving painted scenes show Christ involved in a transformation. Transformation is key to the whole Retable. It was the backdrop for transformations in a very real sense. In front of it, once in a generation, someone was turned into a monarch, while much more often, bread and wine were transformed into the body and blood of Christ.

“To make a fake gem you take sand and ash and transform something ordinary into something beautiful. Henry is telling us that art is above gold. We know how engaged he was with artists of the day. I really believe that he was dedicating human ingenuity and skill to God. He’s making a statement.”

As well as determining the cost of the Westminster Retable, ̽��ֱ��Riddle of the Image is an attempt to look at medieval works of art through the eyes of those who commissioned and made them. Bucklow believes that our modern-day appreciation of cultural artefacts – such as mobile phones – is completely divorced from our understanding of the materials that go into their making.

In medieval times, however, there was a widespread knowledge of artists’ materials that contributed deeper meaning to objects such as the Metz Pontifical (c.1316) and the Macclesfield Psalter (c.1330), both beautiful illuminated manuscripts now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, as well as the Thornham Parva Retable, which was also restored at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, and the Wilton Diptych, Richard II’s iconic portable altarpiece.

Bucklow believes this is because many of the pigments and materials used in the pre-modern world for artistic purposes also had common, everyday uses such as cochineal and lapis lazuli being used in make-up and medicine. (Red dyes were used in heart tonics and the blue stone was used to 'dispel melancholy' and lower fevers.) As such, artists' materials were readily available from apothecaries of the day.

By examining the science of the materials, as well as the techniques of medieval artists, Bucklow hopes to further the reader and art-world’s understanding and appreciation of the paintings, and medieval art in general.

Each chapter in the book is devoted to one of five objects and each builds on the cultural relevance of materials, exploring the connections between artists’ materials and their everyday life; showing how materials could be used philosophically and playfully.

For example, in one of the book’s featured artworks, two blues, one of which cost ten times as much as the other, were used side by side, even though they could not be told apart with the naked eye. In another manuscript, the strange choice of materials matched the bizarre contorted hybrid figures seen swarming across the page margins.

̽��ֱ��Riddle of the Image, published by Reaktion Books, is available now.

Research into England’s oldest medieval altarpiece – which for centuries provided the backdrop to Westminster Abbey coronations – has revealed that it cost no more than the rather unprincely equivalent of eight cows.

̽��ֱ��Westminster Abbey altarpiece would have cost no more than eight cows or about £5 in 13th century money. This is bargain basement stuff.

Spike Bucklow.

Spike Bucklow

Detail from the Westminster Retable

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Who colour-coded Christmas?

lw355 — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:13:44 +0000

Jolly Father Christmas with his rosy cheeks and scarlet coat, shiny green holly with its bright red berries, glittering red decorations on a lush green Christmas tree – the clichéd colour coding of the Christmas season seems as entrenched as the conventions in the West of wearing black to funerals and white to weddings. But where do the familiar Christmas colours come from and what do they really mean?

On Saturday 22 October, Dr Spike Bucklow from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Hamilton Kerr Institute will be examining artists’ materials to ask who came up with the colours of Christmas at the Festival of Ideas, the UK’s only festival devoted to the arts, humanities and social sciences (www.cam.ac.uk/festivalofideas).

“We associate Christmas with red and green because that’s the way we’ve always done it.” said Dr Bucklow. “But one can trace the roots of this colour coding back through the centuries, to a time when the colours themselves had symbolic meaning, possibly as a way of accentuating a significant division or a boundary.”

Although the Victorians wholeheartedly embraced Christmas and introduced many of the traditions we see today – from cards to crackers and trees to turkeys – Dr Bucklow believes that the Christmas colours were not inspired by the Victorians but rather revived by them, and that their significance draws on a history many centuries older.

His research over the past three years, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, has focused on the art history of medieval rood screens, which date from the 14th to the 16th centuries and were used to separate the nave from the chancel of churches. “Although many were defaced or even destroyed during the Reformation, on some of those that survive are beautiful painted panels depicting saints, as well as local donors, merchants and serfs. They were commissioned by parishioners and represent the biggest investment of corporate art that this country has ever seen,” he said.

Strikingly, the vast majority are painted in red and green. “ ̽��ֱ��panels were painted by newly settled members of the Flemish immigrant population or by itinerant English and continental European artists who worked together,” he explained. “Choosing red and green would have been a question of pigment availability but it would also have represented a tradition based on a consciously chosen symbolic meaning. If you like, these colours would have been part of a common language of panel painting that everyone knew about but didn’t necessarily express.”

Dr Bucklow speculates that this meaning is linked to an emphasising of the different spaces in the Church: at one side of the screen, the nave where the parishioners sat; at the other side, the priest’s holy sanctuary and the altar. He further suggests that the Victorians, who carried out some of the early restoration of the medieval churches, would have noticed the colour coding and might have adopted it to accentuate another boundary – the end of one year and the beginning of another at Christmas.

However, he believes that although the medieval rood screen painters effectively left the biggest body of physical evidence for the existence of colour coding, the use of red and green as symbolic colours goes back even further. “As one example, the red–green colour coding appears in the Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh stories from the 13th century, but almost certainly based on an oral tradition that dates back to the pre-Christian Celts many centuries before. Here, the hero comes to a half-red, half-green tree that marks a boundary.”

Today though, in a world flooded with every hue imaginable, Dr Bucklow believes we no longer consider colour to be particularly meaningful. “ ̽��ֱ��sensation of seeing colour has become devalued and downgraded,” he observed. “Our life experience is impoverished by not acknowledging the possibility of symbolic meaning. By contrast, in the Middle Ages and earlier, colour was integrated into a cultural awareness and even an understanding of life. It touched all members of society and conveyed a deeper message.

“For red and green, our comparatively recent obsession with associating these colours with Christmas masks a profound and long-forgotten other history.”

‘Who colour-coded Christmas?’ will take place on Saturday 22 October at the Faculty of Law 11am – 12noon as part of Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Festival of Ideas. Pre-booking is required. Suitable for age 14+.

̽��ֱ��conventional colours of Christmas – red and green – are not, as many might suppose, a legacy of the Victorians. Instead, they hark back to the Middle Ages and perhaps even earlier, according to Cambridge research scientist Dr Spike Bucklow.

For red and green, our comparatively recent obsession with associating these colours with Christmas masks a profound and long-forgotten other history

Dr Spike Bucklow

Gaeten Lee

Santas

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Dragonsblood: the alchemy of paint

bjb42 — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Dragonsblood – a red pigment prized for the best part of two millennia and discussed by apothecaries, alchemists and painters alike – was said to be the mixed, coagulated blood of dragons and elephants collected from the place where the beasts fought and died together. Actually, it was a tree resin, and a sample of the pigment can be found today in Queens’ College, in a medicine cabinet assembled in 1702 by Giovanni Francesco Vigani, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s first Professor of Chemistry. Dragonsblood also features inThe Alchemy of Paint, a book about the colours used by medieval artists. It is a book that attempts to understand medieval artists’ materials as they were perceived by the people who used them. But it was inspired by a very practical modern problem.

Conserving the lost Retable

I work as a scientist in the ̽��ֱ��’s Hamilton Kerr Institute, a department of ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum that specialises in the conservation and restoration of paintings. In 1994, the Institute received the Thornham Parva Retable, a 12ft-long altarpiece painted in the 14th century for a Dominican Priory in Thetford, Norfolk, by artists from Norwich. It had survived destruction in Henry Vlll’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century but was lost until 1927, when it was discovered in a stable loft. By this time, the original 1330s paint was almost entirely covered with paint applied in the 1770s, which had to be removed in order to conserve the medieval material.

̽��ֱ��Institute’s treatment of the Retable was the focus of considerable scrutiny because it is the largest, best-preserved and second oldest altarpiece in the UK. A 22-strong committee of academics, funding bodies and parishioners discussed how to proceed. Over the course of two years, during which microscopic paint samples were analysed by electron microscopy, gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, a consensus gradually came together and the conservation work began.

Cultural contexts, recipes and alchemists

̽��ֱ��suggested treatment strategy was accepted, in large part, because it was based on scientific evidence. As a conservation scientist, from these analyses I understood the consequence of the artists’ materials in terms of their physical and chemical properties, their interaction with the environment and their behaviour when undergoing conservation treatment. But I began to wonder about the medieval artists themselves: how would they have explained the materials and methods involved in making an altarpiece? Were they influenced by their Dominican patrons or indeed by the closeness of Cambridge’s intellectual orbit, both well known in the 14th century for their interest in science?

Looking for clues, I consulted artists’ treatises detailing medieval recipes for pigments and paints, such as the manuals written by Theophilus Presbyter, a 12th-century Benedictine monk, and Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, physician to Charles I and friend of the artist van Dyck. But connecting the physical evidence offered by paintings to the artists’ recipes, which often verged on the bizarre and magical, was not always straightforward. ̽��ֱ��legendary origin of dragonsblood is a case in point. Why would artists say that this derived from dragons and elephants fighting to the death when they knew dragonsblood was really a tree resin? Other medieval recipes were just as evocative: a stone from the doorstep of Paradise and a metal won by one-eyed horsemen from ferocious griffins near the North Pole. ̽��ֱ��recipe books certainly didn’t make sense according to the science that I knew. I needed to brush up on the science with which the artists were familiar: alchemy.

Cloak-and-dagger

̽��ֱ��medieval palette owed much to what some have described as ‘cloak-and-dagger science’, conducted by artists employing secret recipes to create the luxurious colours we are familiar with today. This was the era of alchemy, best known for the quest of alchemists to turn base metals into gold and to find the elixir of eternal life, when scientists like the Dominican Albertus Magnus wrote on the subject. Researching their writings provided me with the necessary technical background to begin the challenge of connecting the physical evidence offered by the scientific analysis of paintings and the recipes in artists’ treatises. ̽��ֱ��Alchemy of Paint is the fruit of that challenge.

Colours, it seems, were read differently in the mindset of medieval Europe. Not only in how people responded to them – ‘scarlet’ today describes a colour, but it was originally a type of cloth – but also in how artists considered their materials. Their ideas, fed by the philosophers and scientists of the time, would probably not be too out of place in the ̽��ֱ��’s 1209 syllabus 800 years ago. Today, an awareness of their ideas helps ensure that conservation of art is undertaken with cultural sensitivity and also immeasurably enhances our appreciation of their art.

Walking the dog

Attempting to join up artists’ theory and practice has been a lot of fun. Walking my dog around Cambridgeshire, across fields and over the nearest things to hills that the region has to offer, I saw the sun set and the stars come out, the seasons come and go, and the colours change. I attempted to familiarise myself with what CS Lewis calledThe Discarded Image, the poetic way that the medieval world view synthesised ‘the whole organisation of their theology, science and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe’. In the medieval world, everything had meaning, even the pigments they painted with. Guidance from the ‘discarded image’ helped me to consider artists’ materials and methods in ways that modern science could not.

̽��ֱ��Alchemy of Paint was a response to a very practical situation: the desire for a broader and deeper view of the Thornham Parva Retable, as well as the Westminster Retable, treated between 1998 and 2005 at the Institute, and the Macclesfield Psalter acquired by ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum in 2005. I was lucky enough to be by the bus-stop, as it were, when three medieval masterpieces came along together. It was an enormous privilege to get to know them and they all informed the thinking behindThe Alchemy of Paint. And I certainly hope that the book will have a practical effect – to encourage students and researchers to engage more profoundly with the products of other cultures.

And the Thornham Parva Retable? It finally returned home in 2003, its treatment hailed as a great success by parishioners, funding bodies and the academic community alike. It even won an award.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Spike Bucklow at the Hamilton Kerr Institute.

Through his exploration of the science of art, the recipes of medieval artists and the writings of alchemists, art conservation scientist Spike Bucklow sets out to disentangle the alchemy of medieval paint.

I began to wonder about the medieval artists themselves: how would they have explained the materials and methods involved in making an altarpiece?

Spike Bucklow

Dean and Chapter, Westminster Abbey

Detail from Westminster Retable

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