Technical art history
Technical art history is an interdisciplinary field of study at the cross-section of science and humanities in which an increasingly wide range of analytical tools is employed to shed light on the creative process from idea to artwork. Researchers from varying fields – among which art history, conservation, and conservation science – collaborate in an interdisciplinary manner to gain “a thorough understanding of the physical object in terms of original intention, choice of materials and techniques as well as the context in and for which the work was created, its meaning and contemporary perception.”

The scientific analysis of art was initially simply referred to as “technical studies”, a term that was used in early publications by the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museums in the 1930s. These technical studies entered the discipline art history in the first half of the twentieth century. Since then, the field has evolved rapidly from an auxiliary science into an independent scholarly field and there have been regular attempts to define its scope and aim in published texts. As the field and its name are still rather young, the definitions and objectives that are presented may vary from scholar to scholar. It is clear that with the emancipation of the field, it has exceeded the collaboration of just art historians, conservators and conservation scientists. A broad definition is therefore required to include methodologies from fields as anthropology, philology, history of science, and material culture.

Two main pathways are followed to explore the physical reality of a work of art: an experimental approach, and the research of documentary sources. The experimental approach includes the direct analysis of works of art and artisanal materials by technical means. Documentary sources include books of secrets and other contemporary writings that deal with artists’ techniques and materials. These sources are vital to the interpretation of the experimental data. It is the combination of these two pathways that calls for the broad range of methodologies and interdisciplinarity of research in the field of technical art history.
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science
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methodologies
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anthropology
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philology
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history of science
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material culture
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books of secrets
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Technical art history
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