We value human life, and rightly so, yet who among us would be hardy enough to state that the preservation of this life for a few years more or less would be of equal importance with the preservation of Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel? We are born to die; these frescoes are born to live. How many among us can bear as important a part in the civilization of the world, and can carry as rich a freight of inspiration to countless thousands of our fellow-men for generations to come, as Botticelli’s Primavera, or one of Titian’s masterpieces? I would not minimize the importance of preserving our own lives but would emphasize the preserving of lives of our pictures. When we die, others will take our places; but what would replace Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper or the paintings in the Uffizi, should they perish?

Written by Francesca G. Bewer, the book also addresses the impact of developments in science on art history. She takes us through early uses of X-rays in determining fakes; the controversial restoration of masterpieces; publicity campaigns to raise funds and public awareness; the insistence on documenting conservation decisions; research into artists’ techniques and materials; questions of inpainting; the impact of WWII on the field; and the critical role of the journal Technical Studies in opening communication in what was a deeply secretive profession. The book is rich in specific case studies, ranging from Forbes’ initial inspiration, a blistering 16^th century panel attributed to Benvenuto di Giovanni he had purchased in Italy and struggled to preserve, to a discussion of bronze disease in 7^th century BC Egyptian  statuary. It’s also full of fantastic images, including documentation of works before and after restoration; scenes of Army commanders packing away Michelangelo statues in German mines; and photos of students peering over early laboratory equipment. Although it focuses primarily on Harvard, the study manages to give a broad picture of the evolution of conservation as a field and some indication of its status today.

Anne van Grevenstein, an art conservator who teaches at the University of Amsterdam, along with Ronald Spronk, an art historian from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, head a team of art experts and trainees conducting a detailed technical analysis of the work, a project funded by a $230,000 grant from the Panel Paintings Initiative of the Getty Foundation … Eventually, the material collected will be put online for other scholars to study. “It seems logical to do,” says Spronk, “but I don’t think it’s ever been done” … At the end of 2008, the foundation launched the Panel Paintings Initiative and set about identifying projects in need of funding — both to help the conservation of noted work but also to help train a new generation of conservators. Conservation of paintings on wooden panels is a highly specialized field, restricted to perhaps a dozen people in the world. “We realized that most of those current experts will retire within the next decade,” says [Getty Foundation director Deborah] Marrow.

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Inquirer tells a story of conservator training paying off:

“An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing ‘The Gross Clinic’ Anew,” an exhibition featuring the just-restored painting, opens at the [Philadelphia] Art Museum’s Perelman Building Saturday … The Gross Clinic, now owned jointly by the Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, has received the most extensive and informed restoration in its history, an astonishing effort led by [Mark S.] Tucker, now 55, the museum’s vice chair of conservation and its senior painting conservator. The restoration was made possible by a massive public effort in 2006, led by the academy and the Art Museum, to raise $68 million and buy the work when Jefferson [Medical College] announced its intent to sell it to a pair of out-of-town museums … Julie Berkowitz, former university art historian at Thomas Jefferson University, said she was “dazzled by the conservation” work done by Tucker and his team … It has taken decades to accumulate the experience and information to bring off the feat, and no one has had more experience with Eakins than Tucker.

Art conservators have long been armed with analytical techniques to explore the chemical make-up of paints and dyes but in the past five years a method called surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has started to attract their attention. Experts predict that in the next five years it will become an established part of the art world’s analytical toolbox … [Marco Leona, a conservation scientist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art] showed that SERS could be applied to a 4000-year-old fragment of an Egyptian painted quiver. He discovered that the red translucent dye on the quiver belonged to madder, an organic plant pigment. The presence of madder-based pigment in such an ancient object is the first evidence of humans having sufficient chemical knowledge to extract a compound from a plant source and precipitate it into a solid pigment … The findings, Leona explains, demonstrate how SERS can potentially change the understanding of human history. In the case of the quiver, the technique didn’t simply allow the analysis ‘to be done a little bit better or a little bit faster’, he says. ‘It was really a difference between being able to do it and not being able to do it.’

An art conservator who set up North America’s first doctoral program in preservation studies, at the University of Delaware, has been named to a new chair in material culture, the study of societies’ artifacts … In 1990, Ms. Stoner set up North America’s first doctoral program in preservation studies at Delaware, even before she had completed her own Ph.D. (There are now two others, at New York University and the State University of New York College at Buffalo.) … With a colleague, she is editing a 700-page volume, Conservation of Easel Paintings, due out in 2011 … Ms. Stoner hopes she will reach more people by speaking than she can by treating paintings one by one. Her goal? “To stop people from throwing out their torn paintings. And if I can get to the public and say ‘Do not clean your paintings with Ajax,’ I’ll have done well.”

There never seems to have been a time when restoration has not been the stuff of controversy … Anglo-Saxon and Italian approaches have, since the cleaning controversies of the 1960s, been especially at odds, to the extent that Conti and [Cesare] Brandi – both authors of seminal works … have only just been translated into English. They fact that they have, is, I hope, an indication of a change of climate within the field of restoration … The original impetus for this translation was my increasing despondency at the fact that over the past twenty years, I have had fewer and fewer students with anything other than their maternal tongue.

In 2005, Cynthia Rockwell published the first full English translation of Brandi’s Theory of Restoration (written in 1963), which is now out of print.

The painting’s surface had darkened considerably in the 150 years since the last major restoration. It also underwent small repairs in 1958 after a visitor attacked it with a hammer, injuring the Virgin’s stomach and elbow … The restoration took about a year and also involved non-invasive techniques such as X-ray and radiography, but did not remove any of the painting for testing … Details and updates were posted on the Brera’s website.

“For months at a time, you don’t see anybody working,” said [Zeynep] Ahunbay, a professor of architecture at Istanbul Technical University. She had directed a partial restoration of the building’s exterior in the late 1990s and is regarded by conservators as its guardian angel. “One year there is a budget, the next year there is none,” she said with a sigh. “We need a permanent restoration staff, conservators for the mosaics, frescoes and masonry, and we need to have them continuously at work” …

Astonishingly—although many scholars have studied Hagia Sophia over the years—the building has never been completely documented. New discoveries may yet be made. In the 1990s, during emergency repairs on the dome, workers uncovered graffiti that had been scrawled by tenth-century repairmen, imploring God for protection as they worked from scaffolds 150 feet above the floor. “Kyrie, voithi to sou doulo, Gregorio,” ran a typical one—”Lord, help your servant, Gregorius.” Says [UPenn architectural historian Robert] Ousterhout, “You can imagine how scared they might have been up there.”

A panel of observers was presented with pairs of reproductions of figurative and abstract oil and watercolour paintings, regions of which had been altered digitally prior to printing to give a known colour difference from the original. In the first part of the study, the observers were asked if a colour difference could be observed, to assess the scale of a ‘just noticeable difference’ (JND) in these complex scenes. In the second part, observers assessed the acceptability of a change over a period of 10, 50 or 100 years. The results demonstrated that the JND is sometimes larger in complex scenes than in simple colour pairs and that changes in smaller areas, more peripheral areas, or areas in abstract images are less noticeable. In the second phase of the study, changes to the figurative oil painting were generally deemed less acceptable than changes of equivalent magnitude in the abstract or watercolour images. The implications of the findings for museum lighting policy and the concept of a ‘serviceable life’ for objects are explored.