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Maney Publishing

Traces of the Past: Unraveling the Secrets of Archaeology through Chemistry by Joseph B.LambertReview by: David ScottJournal of the American Institute for Conservation, Vol. 38, No. 1, Albert Bierstadt and19th-Century American Art (Spring, 1999), pp. 86-87Published by: Maney Publishing on behalf of The American Institute for Conservation of Historic &Artistic WorksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3179841 .

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Page 2: Albert Bierstadt and 19th-Century American Art || [untitled]

86 BOOK REVIEWS

treatises by Vicente Carducho, Francisco Pacheco, and Jusepe Martinez. Veliz also contributed an

outstanding paper on the restoration methods used for the paintings in the Spanish Royal Col- lections following a fire in 1734 to the 1998 pub- lication on the history of painting restoration.

Much assistance with the understanding of Dutch paintings is provided by three articles: Jor- gen Wadum lists the different Antwerp brands found on early 17th-century panels, their design, size and other characteristics in chronological order; Erman Hermens and Arie Wallert provide many detailed recipes from "The Pekstok Pa-

pers" of the last quarter of the seventeenth cen-

tury; and Ineke Pey describes in depth the "sam-

ple book" of the Amsterdam paintware trader, Michiel Hafkenscheid (1772-1846). Arie Wallert worked with Joris Dik to compare two still-life

paintings by Jan van Huysum. I hope I have provided the details to indicate

what a pithy and important collection of infor- mation this book represents and also its areas of

strength and omission. Except for a fleeting ref- erence to Andy Warhol, this book does not cover American art or paintings from origins outside of

Europe. However, it provides a wealth of sub- stantive background for visual understanding of the physical presence of major European paint- ings. On page 119, Margriet van Eikema Hommes comments, "To an important extent, the knowledge about the durability of materials and techniques was handed down within the studio tradition from master painter to pupil." I

thought to myself how that had also been true in the teaching of methods of the examination of

paintings until the publication of such books as

this-gloriously illustrated and copiously foot- noted.

Joyce Hill Stoner Art Conservation Department University of Delaware 303 Old College Newark, DE 19716-2515

JOSEPH B. LAMBERT, TRACES OF THE PAST: UNRAVELING THE SECRETS OF ARCHAEOL- OGY THROUGH CHEMISTRY.

Addison-Wesley, Mass.: Helix Books, 1997. 319

pages, hardcover $30. ISBN 0-201-40928-3.

Traces of the Past is an entertaining book that de- scribes how chemistry has forged our develop- ment in the use of materials-from stone to met- als. It also describes an ever-increasing array of scientific tools to characterize these accomplish- ments and provides important data on things as fundamental as human lineage, the spread of disease, and the geographical origin of rocks and minerals. The book is sensibly organized into

chapters that begin with the lithic and ceramic and moves via color, glass and organics, to met- als and humans. The book also contains a useful

glossary, a list for reading, and a combined au- thor and subject index.

Conservators will find the book invaluable in

providing a succinct reading on the nature of the materials they often treat, but which they often fail to appreciate in terms of the chemical and an-

alytical potential that the materials represent. In a similar vein, one could say that the author is somewhat unaware of the potential for chemical studies of the degradation, deterioration, and conservation that the archaeological corpus rep- resents. As such, there are points of references to

Archaeometry but no references to the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, and only a

couple to the international Studies in Conservation.

Stone, dyes, pigments, amber, wood and ceram- ics are subjects often discussed in the pages of these journals, and much of this information is

primarily scientific in content and descriptive in the same sense as papers on technological sub-

jects in archaeometric journals. One of the strengths of the book is a helpful

update of the current state of provenancing stud- ies of materials. The author also includes a good description of the analytical information that is

necessary to undertake these provenance studies.

I found particularly useful the chapters dealing with diet and trace elements, isotopes and food,

JAIC 38 (1999):83-96

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Page 3: Albert Bierstadt and 19th-Century American Art || [untitled]

BOOK REVIEWS 87 87

and genetic history from blood analysis-areas of reading that most of us last tackled during our student days when following general courses on the nature of materials. One of the beneficial as- pects of this book is, therefore, the breadth of its coverage. Its lack of depth could be considered a drawback. An example of this deficiency is that no references to the work of Newton on glass, glass technology, or glass deterioration occurs in the text despite the well-known volume on the subject by Newton and Davison. Brill, the other major contributor to glass studies, does get sev- eral citations, but this is a typical feature of the book as a whole. Comprehensive coverage is not easy to achieve in one volume covering scores of different materials. Therefore, the book cannot be relied upon to provide an overall view on any particular subject. Rather, its educative strength is the wide net that the author has cast, even though some potentially important things have slipped through.

The publishers are to be greatly commended for being able to produce this hardback volume of 319 pages, including 16 color figures, for an ex- tremely reasonable price of $30. It is a pity that similar conservation texts cannot be produced hardback for this kind of expense. Perhaps the publishers are anticipating a large volume of sales. In which case, let this reviewer help them in their endeavor and finish by saying that for $30 this book is excellent value for the money.

David Scott Senior Scientist Museum Research Laboratory Getty Conservation Institute 1200 Getty Center Drive Suite 700 Los Angeles, CA 90049

DAVID PHILLIPS, EXHIBITING AUTHENTICITY. Manchester: Manchester University Press/New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. 234 pages, hard- cover $59.95, ISBN O 7190 4796 X; softcover $24.95, ISBN 0 7190 4797 8.

David Phillips is a former curator who made practical decisions about the conservation and presentation of artworks; he now teaches in the museum studies program at the University of Manchester. He is writing for a broad spectrum of museum professionals and situates the activi- ty of conservation in the context of museum prac- tice. The thrust of the book, paradoxical as it may sound, is to save conservation and curatorship from the threat of absolute relativism by showing the limitations of "authenticity" as a basis for practice. The result is not only a healthy rela- tivism but also a novel way of looking at the aims of conservation in relation to curatorship.

To appreciate Phillips's contribution to the philosophy of conservation, it is important to note current trends in museum studies. Part of the post-modernist movement that swept the hu- manities in the 1980s and 1990s has undermined simple notions of "truth" in scholarship and in its extreme manifestations considers any interpre- tation of art or history as valid as any other. It also attacks museums and other cultural institu- tions as vehicles of social control and political power. (Ivan Gaskell surveys this literature in Art Bulletin 77 (December 1995), 690-5). Phillips points out that the "old" art history and conser- vation have been dominated by a sort of naive re- alism, in which good practice in attribution, con- servation, or display assumes that the experience of the museum visitor can be an "authentic" ex- perience of the artist's intentions or of the past. Unfortunately, he finds that this basis for au- thority is fragile if not spurious. Thus he seeks a sounder basis for practice between the extremes of naive realism and absolute relativism.

The book's eight chapters divide neatly into an introduction on the recent controversy about the role of museums; four chapters on the practice of

JAIC 38 (1999):83-96

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.44 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 19:46:05 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions