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Video presentation for the 19th ICOM-CC Triennial Conference, 2021 Beijing, Working Group Preventive Conservation. It accompanies the published paper 'Loans to non-museum organisations: concepts for crossing boundaries'. The presentation illustrates the decision-making process and tools described in the paper with a case study of a loan of artworks from the Dutch state collection kept by the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands to Story House Belvedere in Rotterdam. The decision-making process is founded on the principles of value management, weighing the possible gain of social-societal values against the possible loss of cultural-historical values. The tools assist in finding affordable solutions to make non-museum loans happen in a responsible manner. Experience shows that non-museum loans are often possible, are highly rewarding, and allow lender and borrower to make optimal use of the connecting power of heritage to bridge gaps in society.
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Esther van Duijn works as paintings conservator and researcher at the Rijksmuseum. She has specialized in the conservation history of the paintings collection of the Rijksmuseum and is currently part of the Operation Night Watch team. Between 1945 and 1947, Rembrandt’s iconic masterpiece The Night Watch (1642) was treated by C.H. Jenner (liner) and H.H. Mertens (restorer). As a result of the painting’s fame and changing attitudes towards restoration and technical research in the post-war Rijksmuseum, the 1945–47 treatment was exceptionally well documented for its time. This paper discusses the materials and methods used during this treatment and places them in a broader context by examining how they compare to later sources describing the materials and methods used by Mertens or under his supervision.
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Lambert van Eijck is assistant professor at the Applied Sciences faculty of TU Delft. He develops neutron methods for materials science and has been applying neutron computed tomography and neutron diffraction techniques to cultural heritage objects over the last few years. In this presentation, Lambert will show his latest research on the enigmatic 17th century microscopes of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the founder of 'microbiology'. His skills in microscope instrumentation were unsurpassed worldwide for more than 150 years, with his contemporaries being very eager to learn his tricks. During his life and up till recently, the exceptional optical performance of these microscopes was assigned to his lens-making skills, about which he was very secretive. With only a few Van Leeuwenhoek microscopes left in the world, Lambert embarked on a quest with Tiemen Cocquyt of Rijksmuseum Boerhaave to reveal the secret of the Van Leeuwenhoek microscopes. This presentation will address the long and winding road to revealing the secret, after 350 years.
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Marjolein Koek works as a textile conservator at the Rijksmuseum. The Rijksmuseum holds a number of weighted silk objects in its costume collection. During the late 19th and early 20th century silk was often weighted with metal salts. This process was done in order to increase its value (silk was sold by weight) and to improve processes such as dyeing. The care and conservation of degraded weighted silk is highly problematic. Costume collections worldwide are having trouble managing and conserving this type of objects. This presentation will discuss the developments of finding an easy method to identify objects made from weighted silk in the costume collection of the Rijksmuseum.
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Tirza Mol is associate furniture and shipmodel conservator at Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. The maritime collection of the Rijksmuseum contains around 300 half hull shipmodels. A halfmodel is a scale model from the starboard or portside half of a ship hull, mounted on a wooden backboard. They are constructed in wood, polychromed and finished with a transparent varnish. Little is known about the function of these halfmodels, their provenance and date of production. It is assumed they played a role in the 18th and 19th century Dutch shipbuilding industry, but what role exactly is not defined. By means of tool trace research and the study of construction, the production process is analyzed. Dendrochronological research will lead to more accurate dating of the models. Eventually, by clustering the models according to stylistic features, materials and tool traces, as well as dendrochronological and archive data, they may be attributed to specific ship wharfs. This lecture shares the preliminary results of this fascinating interdisciplinary research.
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Nouchka De Keyser is a junior researcher at the science department of the Rijksmuseum within operation Night Watch and a PhD student at the AXES research group of the University of Antwerp. Her research focuses on 17th-century paint technology and tries to gain a comprehensive understanding of how and why particular optical effects are systematically more affected by degradation using non-invasive imaging techniques.
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Antonio Iaccarino Idelson is an art conservator based in Rome, Italy, with a degree from Istituto Centrale per il Restauro. CEO and co-founder of Equilibrarte, he works on paintings, wall paintings and sculptures. He has been doing research on the effects of tension in canvas paintings and their mechanical behavior since 1992, and published a book on the subject in 2004. Currently a PhD candidate with Dr. Roger Groves as Promoter, at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering of the Technical University Delft, with a research project entitled "The determination of the value of tension of canvas paintings through the impulse of a sound wave”. Canvas paintings are intimately connected with their stretchers and they often conflict on one specific subject: tension. Tension regulates the appearance of the painting, avoiding distortions, but it also regulates the conservation of the paint layers. Insufficient tension is often perceived as a problem because of its visible effects, but excessive tension is the main cause of cracks and other structural problems.
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Mitra Almasian is a postdoctoral researcher at both the Rijksmuseum and the Amsterdam UMC, University Medical Centers. Her research focusses on the use of optical techniques for non-invasive imaging and diagnostics, with a main focus on OCT. Within Operation Night Watch, Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) was applied to non-invasively image the varnish and paint layers. In collaboration with the Biomedical Engineering and Physics department of Amsterdam UMC, virtual cross-sectional images from selected regions of interest were collected. These images revealed the internal structure of varnish and semi-transparent layers, and enabled the micro-scale mapping of the paint topology underneath semi-transparent layers. During this talk some high-lights, the added value of OCT within Operation Night Watch and possible future perspectives of OCT research in cultural heritage are discussed.