In an earlier lifetime as a curator, on a visit to Florence Italy in 1996, I made arrangements to meet with Maurizio Seracini, Director of Editech, a company specializing in diagnostic imaging of art works. In terms of full disclosure, let me say that Seracini is an independent professional, a respected colleague, and a friend.  We collaborated on a plan for a grant, briefly, a decade ago, and  presented a paper on some of the issues presented here in Florence in 2003.

In 1996, as an art historian and museum professional working at a small museum, I was marginally prepared for the work going on at Editech with raking light photography,x-radiography,infrared-reflectography, and paint analysis. I considered all these techniques as interesting specialized tools made available, at the request of a curator, on an as-needed basis as a means of studying and analyzing works of art to bolster or disprove academic theories, and as means to decide if and when an object could travel to a special exhibition.

Seracini passionately believes, like many of us in the field,  that new technologies make the idea of preventative diagnostic imaging a reality. They can and ought to be more widely used throughout the art world, and not just as a palliative when works are threatened or damaged.  In our discussions over the past decade, I am consistently struck by his dedication to one point that he returns to again and again–if the technology exists to give museums and art historians chronological truths about the current state of an object’s conservation, preservation, and interpretation, do museum professionals and art historians have a moral imperative to ask the questions that will drive us to these truths? 

Required Reading – Heritage Health Index Report

Late last year the Heritage Preservation: The National Institute for Conservation produced a survey entitled “A Public Trust at Risk: The Heritage Healh Index Report on the State of America’s Collections. http://www.heritagepreservation.org/HHI/index.html

The website includes the following key findings: 65% of collecting institutions have experienced damage to collections due to improper storage, 80% of U.S. collecting institutions do not have an emergency plan that includes collections, with staff trained to carry it out, and 190 million objects are in need of conservation treatment.

So is it too late to talk about preventative conservation?

Maurizio Seracini has been much in the news lately for his work on the Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi.  A search on his name in any search engine will yield a number of different articles http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2198850,00.html   The idea of preventative conservation tends to get lost in all the DaVinci Code white noise surrounding any discussion of Leonardo’s works.

Seracini is concerned with educating a new generation of art diagnosticians, museum professionals, and visitors about how new technologies can document the impact of interactions between humans and the art objects that form part of our cultural heritage (preventative conservation).

Preventive conservation requires as first and mandatory step a full knowledge and understanding of the anatomy and pathology of a work of art. This would set the time zero for conservation of each single art object. From then on, the data on an art work should be updated to understand the evolution of the decay process. Just as a patient is monitored in a hospital, the technologies exist to allow works of art to be monitered in a museum or gallery environment much more effectively than we are currently doing.

This field is at its primordial state.  Cultural heritage professionals need not only the technologies but the know-how to be able to update conservation data of art works on display, without removing them from their normal locations. When objective data can be accessed to justify actions to be taken on the art object (restoration, maintenance, or simply proper display) we will have achieved a significant scientific and moral victory with regard to our various cultural patrimonies.

These goals arouse elements of controversy and the suspicion of conspiracy in and about the art world.  It is curious that while the general population is fascinated by restoration, the idea of preventative conservation seems an anathema to many—as if there is a secret conspiracy among curators and conservators to eventually remove all art from the eyes of the public.

The most serious concern raised by the concept of preventative conservation is the fear that if certain types of art objects are more forcefully impacted by human contact, the art world, and museums specifically might be forced to re-evaluate how and why objects are displayed, the numbers of visitors of who are allowed into galleries during a given time period, and the types of presentations or performances that are permitted in galleries. 

Day-to-day concerns of running large institutions make it easy to lose sight of more ambiguous long-term issues. On the other hand the ICOM Code of Professional Ethics is anything but ambiguous:

An essential ethical obligation of every member of the museum profession is to ensure the proper care and conservation of collections and individual items for which the employing institutions are responsible.  The intention must be to ensure that the collections are passed on to future generations in as good and safe a condition as practiciable, having regard to current knowledge and resources. (http://icom.museum/ethics_rev_engl.html#6)

Blogs are a way to get conversations going.  Anyone care to begin a discussion on this topic?

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