A few days before a critical progress meeting with my supervisors, I had a slight headache. The invitation to attend the two-day session about the possibilities and limits of technical art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art the following month, but it endangered my tight schedule. I am a happy-slash-busy PhD student trying to navigate through this intense process of creating a dissertation. Was I really going to loose two precious days? To go or not to go, that was the question.

A brief talk with Alixe Bovey helped me make up my mind. Of course I was going to attend! No way I was going to miss the opportunity. You see, I kinda swopped art history for book history. No regrets about it, but still, I am missing close contact with art.

Let me paint the picture of these two days and frame my experience at the Courtauld. The program was carefully structured. Fifteen of us began eye to eye with Botticelli’s pala d’altare of the Trinity before public opening time – pure joy! We spend an hour formulating research questions ourselves; for spent the rest of the workshop trying to answer these questions using technical analysis and other methods.

On the first day we learned about the provenance and history of Botticelli’s Trinity, learned about the construction of Italian timber altarpieces, examined a fake Botticelli in the Courtauld’s conservation studio. The second day  dealt with the science behind x-ray and infrared imaging. After that we went to the National Gallery for examination of its Botticellis. We then studied the infrared images of Botticelli’s Trinity that had been made especially for the workshop. We ended by returning to the Trinity  in the gallery, to review our initial questions and consider which of them had been answered, and whether the process had raised any new ones.

Was it worth going? Well, I surely would not have written for this blog if I’d thought I wasted my time. Indeed, it was an immense pleasure to listen and talk to specialists in the field, to people who can teach me something. I occasionally lead tours in museums and art fairs. In this position I am the specialist sharing knowledge with the public. This can be a lot of fun, but I try to never skip an opportunity to learn more about art. But did this workshop contributes to my PhD project or does it stop with two days of spielerei?

These two days gave me food for thought. My PhD project, titled “Contextualizing Art Technical Knowledge in Early Modern Europe”, focuses on the first English printed instruction manual for book illuminations, called A Very Proper Treatise (1573). In my thesis, I first evaluate this book as a collection of recipes. I try to trace where these recipes came from, and where and why they were copied. This has helped me to helps me to think about the circulation or dissemination of art technical knowledge in the Early Modern period. Another approach I use is material investigation. The material study of books can tell us plenty of things today. For instance, I can detect information about the manual’s readership, and consider the consumption of books as commodities. Another strand of my research is the market for what might be termed ‘books of secrets’.

For the contextualization of A Very Proper Treatise I am very interested in the availability of materials. Some of its recipes are recycled from much earlier sources. Quite often, the same ingredients are kept, but alternative ingredients are suggested as well. Since some of the source material of A Very Proper Treatise comes from other countries, I speculate that the proposed ingredients might reflect the availability of those materials in a certain geographic place.

And this (without realizing it in advance) is exactly where I needed the Courtauld workshop. The art historian in me got reactivated again. I found the method of research for the contextualization of ingredients of A Very Proper Treatise. Technical art history offers the solution. For instance, pigment analysis can tell me which pigments were actually used in art work and I can compare them with the pigments proposed in A Very Proper Treatise.

This transfer of methods is not flawless – and I am a novice in this field. The introduction the Courtauld offered focused on panel painting. The recipes in my research are explicitly meant for drawing and painting on supports as parchment and paper, and especially for book illumination. Happily, technical analysis has been conducted on a wide range of supports so there is potential for me to think about how to apply these methods to my project.

Attending this workshop made me think differently about my project. It gave me the opportunity to make use of new methods in my research. There is nothing more beautiful than saying: I was asking the wrong questions. Instead of giving up two days on my thesis, I gained about two weeks!

Annemie Leemans

TEEME Programme (Erasmus Mundus)

University of Kent & Universidade do Porto