Nondestructive Evaluation of Heritage Object Coatings with Four Hyperspectral Imaging Systems

Advanced imaging techniques can noninvasively characterise, monitor, and evaluate how conservation treatments affect cultural heritage objects. In this specific field, hyperspectral imaging allows nondestructive characterisation of materials by identifying and characterising colouring agents, binders, and protective coatings as components of an object’s original construction or later historic additions. Furthermore, hyperspectral imaging can be used to monitor deterioration or changes caused by environmental conditions. This paper examines the potential of hyperspectral imaging (HSI) for the evaluation of heritage objects. Four cameras operating in different spectral ranges were used to nondestructively scan a beehive panel painting that originated from the Slovene Ethnographic Museum collection. The specific objective of this research was to identify pigments and binders present in the samples and to spatially map the presence of these across the surface of the art piece. Merging the results with databases created in parallel using other reference methods allows for the identification of materials originally used by the artist on the panel. Later interventions to the original paintings can also be traced as part of past conservation campaigns.

Embracing Creative Transience: From Political Remix Video to Digital Collage

In this essay, I explore my latest series of digital collages titled Notes and Narratives. These works utilize additive, subtractive, and substitutive remix strategies to integrate Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque paintings with visages of Donald Trump and his associates. The series appropriates historical masterworks to interrelate the theologico-political foundations of the original paintings with the political turbulence experienced under the Trump administration. Notes and Narratives foregrounds remix as a powerful and potent tool for disruption, change, and communication in the continuum of pedagogic praxes and remix studies. My previous artistic work was dedicated to creating political remix videos, and this body of work represents a fork in my creative practice. The immediacy of the collages draws upon intertextuality and remix strategies to reveal passionate polemical positions, positing contentious criticisms of the political leadership in the United States.

La fotografia nel museo d’arte a fine Ottocento: sovrapposizioni e occasioni per una rinnovata filologia visiva. Alcuni spunti

The article deals with the effects of photography on the practices of art historians, focusing on some German cases. Photography, defined by Paul de Saint-Victor in 1887 as the “musée en action de l’art européen,” offered unprecedented opportunities for a renewed visual philology. Yet this evolution was more complex and less unidirectional than is generally thought. The illustrated publications of Gustav Scheuer in the 1860s attest to different ways of manipulating photographic images and illuminate the connections between photography and comparative methods, which initially concerned the relationships between original paintings and photographs much more than those among paintings themselves.

Constructing Paradise in the Western Imagination:

Enhanced with a few of my original paintings, this essay explores various notions of a tropical paradise in the Western imagination. Secondly, it traces some of the implications for the respective people and country. The work draws on my personal experiences, research and study in several Western arts institutions as well as in former, European colonies in the tropics. At the discussion’s centre, are experiences and pursuits of Paul Gauguin, a noted seeker of paradise? The essay further explores how colonial perceptions and perspectives have influenced and continue to impact the socio-economic and cultural production of ‘tourism products’ in small island developing states (SIDS), such as Jamaica and some other countries in the Caribbean.

Synagogue Decorations in Present-Day Ukraine: Practice in Preservation of Cultural and Artistic Heritage

There are approximately ten historical synagogue buildings left in Ukraine today which continue, to varying extents, to preserve their original wall paintings and decoration. A number of these were only recently discovered. The attempts underway, beginning in the early 2000s, to preserve as well as uncover old paintings often produce the opposite effect, destroying authentic works. The cultural significance of these historical landmarks requires that they be included in a single international register, along with supervision and an agreed upon preservation program designed individually for each. Synagogue wall paintings will inevitably perish unless ways of transferring this heritage are sought that will move these works to a different and more reliable “medium of cultural memory”. Different, innovative approaches to museum preservation and ways of presenting these works to public view are called for. Among the tried and tested options are: reconstructing old synagogue interiors which contain wall or ceiling paintings; using motifs taken from the original paintings in new works being produced for the Jewish community; and work on exhibition projects, catalogues and two-dimensional reconstruction models.