SESSION: Technical Art History: Integrating Art History with Scientific Inquiry

Scientific and technical inquiry has transformed the way we see artworks and has helped challenge established narratives of authorship, dating, and studio practice. Yet these studies too often unfold in disciplinary silos: scientists generate data without sufficient (art)-historical framing, while art historians may be unaware of scientific techniques that can enrich and support their lines of research. This session asks how we might dismantle that divide and build genuinely co-created, bidirectional investigations in which scientific evidence and art historical interpretation are developed and debated on equal terms.

The session will comprise a short introduction to TAH by the session organisers, 5 papers of 15 minutes each, with 5 minutes for discussion/questions, and a 20-minute roundtable discussion at the end about the definition and role of TAH in museum culture.

Session Convenors:

Erma Hermens, Fitzwilliam Museum/Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge

Paul J.C. van Laar, Fitzwilliam Museum/Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge

Session Speakers:

Aviva Burnstock, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Karen Serres, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Nathan Daly, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Nude with Blonde Hair signed Seurat in the Collection of the Courtauld Gallery: the Collaborative Re-Examination of a Work on the Gallows

The painting Nude with Blonde Hair has long been considered a rare mistake in the collecting career of the textile magnate Samuel Courtauld (1876–1947), who put together one of the superlative collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art in the UK, and was instrumental in purchasing key works of that movement for the National Gallery. The painting bears the signature ‘Seurat’ and was acquired by Courtauld as a work by the Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat (1859–1891) in 1923. However, by the 1930s, it had been relegated to the status of forgery due to its awkward style. The painting underwent its first technical and scientific analysis only very recently, in preparation for a display on forgeries in the Courtauld Gallery’s collection. Its intriguing initial results led to the re-evaluation of the work, with a curator, a conservator, and a scientist working collaboratively. The findings included the multiple reuse of the canvas, revealed by technical imaging, and materials consistent with Seurat’s practice, as seen through elemental mapping and X-radiography. This prompted further technical and scientific investigation, as well as a review of the work’s historical records and provenance, leading to new discoveries and a questioning of authorship. The dialogue is ongoing, and has led to a reflection on which questions can and cannot be answered by our various disciplines and on the advantages of collaborative interdisciplinary research in the re-evaluation of works of art

Sam Taylor, British Museum

Tracing the Line: Investigating Attribution and Ambiguity in an Early Netherlandish Drawing attributed to Pieter Bruegel

Originally thought to be a preparatory drawing by Pieter Bruegel for the 1555 print Soliticito Rustica as part of a series of landscape prints, the British Museum’s pen and brown ink Alpine landscape drawing was later reattributed to an imitator known as the Master of the Mountain Landscapes, an unknown artist active around the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century.

This reassessment was based on the drawing’s meticulous style, which lacked the vibrancy associated with autograph Bruegel sheets, and its cropped state. However, recent investigations have reignited the debate on authorship and function. The drawing is a reversed image of the print, typical for a preparatory study and shows evidence of transfer to the printing matrix, including a blackened verso and indentations with a metallic grey medium. Using non-invasive imaging techniques: Short-Wave Infrared Reflectography (SWIR) and macro-X-ray fluorescence analysis (MA-XRF), the nature of the metallic grey medium was mapped and identified to explore a potential connection with a transfer process or an alternative function.

These characteristics, along with the mirror-image relationship to the print, distinguish it from the imitator’s copies, which typically follow the same direction as the print, and are more consistent with two other known preparatory drawings for the print series, which are also reversed and indented. This strongly suggests the British Museum drawing is an intermediary design by Bruegel. While the relationship is complex due to discrepancies between the drawing and the print, the findings highlight the value of material evidence in re-examining the practices of 16th-century artists.

Vincent Cattersel, Research Group Antwerp Cultural Heritage Sciences (ARCHES), University of Antwerp & European decorative Arts department, Royal Museums of Art & History (KMKG-RMAH), Brussels

Lacquer scagliola: Tracking a mid-seventeenth-century European Lacquer technique

This paper responds to a thirty-year-old call by art historian Ria Fabri to investigate the meaning of terms related to “coloured lacquerwork” (“colleurt lackwerck”) in the context of seventeenth-century Antwerp furniture production.

Fabri encountered these lacquer-related terms in the accounting records of the Antwerp art-dealer Forchondt, yet noted that their context remains unclear due to ambiguities regarding their meaning, material-technical context, and the absence of a linked corpus of Antwerp furniture.

We addressed this call through a multidisciplinary approach:

1. Resolving terminological ambiguity through the systematic inventory and transcription of furniture-related entries in Forchondt’s accounting records (1645–1665), providing insights into terminological, material-technical, and cabinet makers’ network contexts.
2. Cross-checking the archival results against our dataset of 600 seventeenth-century Antwerp furniture objects to identify a corpus related to lacquer.
3. Art-technical study of a selection of objects from the identified corpus, ranging from construction study to advanced chemical characterisation and imaging.

As a result, we link the historical terms to a corpus of 59 Antwerp furniture objects decorated with mother-of-pearl fauna–flora motifs embedded in a coloured lacquer matrix. The art-technical and stylistic study shows a strong relationship with the German stuckmarmor-intarsiata, a late-sixteenth- to early-seventeenth-century gypsum-based technique that emulates costly hardstone inlay. For this relationship, we refer to this technique as “lacquer scagliola”.

Juan Pablo Rodriguez Jimenez, National Museums Scotland

A Protocol for Multidisciplinary Teams: Combining Art Historical and Scientific Analysis to Reconstruct the Object History of Indian Paintings at National Museums Scotland (NMS)

Drawing on data from an ongoing case study at NMS, our paper reports on efforts to overcome disciplinary silos in museum work and research. We present a protocol for multidisciplinary work and an innovative framework to test its effectiveness, borrowing evaluation techniques from the social sciences.

NMS has embarked on a pilot study to develop methods for investigating a rare group of Indian paintings from Murshidabad, Bengal, in its collections. In 1766, Archibald Swinton (1731–1804), a captain in the East India Company, brought these paintings back to Scotland, where he displayed them on the walls of his stately dining room to remember his time in India.

We understand these paintings as sites of cultural contact between European customers and Bengali artisans. As a multidisciplinary team of in-house experts with backgrounds in paper and artefact conservation, photography, analytical and heritage science, and art history, we bring together scientific analyses of the physical objects and their (art)historical contextualisation to reconstruct the histories of these paintings.

An integral part of our study is the development of the first protocol for multidisciplinary working at NMS, including how to navigate disciplinary specifics, facilitate knowledge exchange between team members and create a shared vocabulary. We will apply two evaluation tools – HEART (Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention and Task Success) and SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) – to assess the effectiveness of our protocol for multidisciplinary teams at NMS. Our findings will help to enable synergies that can emerge from multidisciplinary work in everyday museum practice

Rhiannon Clarricoates, Lincoln Conservation, University of Lincoln

Phillipa McDonnell, Lincoln Conservation, University of Lincoln

Architectural Finishes Research: The underexploited discipline that uncovered an interior scheme attributed to William Kent.

Architectural Finishes Research (AFR) is an interdisciplinary approach that combines material analysis and documentary evidence to reveal the decorative history of the built environment. Predominantly undertaken in a commercial context, AFR practitioners have developed a fluency in communicating complex technical findings to non-specialist audiences, often directly impacting conservation and design decisions. Yet commercial constraints—confidentiality, narrow briefs, and limited scope—can curtail the wider dissemination and development of its research.

Using the ongoing project at Stowe House, uncovering wall paintings attributed to William Kent, this paper argues that AFR exemplifies the collaborative, evidence-based ethos of technical art history, yet remains siloed from it – an issue that this presentation seeks to address. It examines how AFR’s synthesis and communication of scientific, visual, and documentary evidence beyond academia can serve as a model for integrative art-technological approaches at every stage of a project. Particularly, it considers the practical and political challenges of working within a commercial context and addresses how these can be navigated.

Finally, AFR has the power to transform how historic interiors are understood and represented: aligning artworks depicting interiors with surviving material evidence, tracing the use and evolution of materials and design, and revealing how aesthetic and practical choices shaped interpretation across time. This paper is therefore both reflection and invitation—a call to weave AFR more overtly and confidently into art-historical discourse, and to spark connections still underexplored.