This long awaited English edition of Manuale per la conservazione e il restauro di disegni e stampe antichi (1991) offers a clear and complete manual for the preservation and conservation of old master prints and drawings. The authors throw light on the historical and scientific backgrounds concerning the problems of restoration techniques of arts on paper, from 1150, when paper was first introduced in Europe, until the middle of the nineteenth century. The book is indispensable for anyone occupied with the study and conservation of old prints and drawings. This richly illustrated, first English edition is revised and brought fully up to date.

In the last decade of his life, Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) undertook a printmaking project that changed the conventions of portraiture. In a series later named the Iconography, he portrayed artists alongside kings, courtiers, and diplomats--a radical departure from preexisting conventions. He also depicted his subjects in novel ways, focusing on their facial features often to the exclusion of symbolic costumes or props. In addition to illustrating approximately 60 works by Van Dyck and other artists from his era--particularly Rembrandt--this catalogue traces the artist's influence over hundreds of years. Showcasing both 17th century portraits in a variety of media and portrait prints by a wide range of artists spanning the 16th through the 20th centuries--including Albrecht Dürer, Hendrick Goltzius, Francisco de Goya, Edgar Degas, and Jim Dine--the book demonstrates the indelible mark that Van Dyck left on the genre.

The 2nd edition of The Care of Prints and Drawings provides practical, straightforward advice to those responsible for the preservation of works on paper, ranging from curators, facility managers, conservators, registrars, collection care specialists, private collectors, artists, or students of museum studies, visual arts, art history, or conservation. A greater emphasis is placed on preventive conservation, a trend among collecting institutions, which reflects the growing recognition that scarce resources are best expended on preventing deterioration, rather than on less effective measures of reversing it. Expanded and richly illustrated chapters include: Supports for Prints and Drawings discusses the properties of parchment and paper and introduces the general preservation needs and conservation problems of all works on paper, regardless of their media. Conservation Problems Related to the Paper Support of Prints and Drawings presents a guide to recognizing the symptoms and diagnosing the causes of damage specific to paper. Conservation Problems Related to the Materials and Techniques of Prints describes the conservation problems that affect certain printmaking materials and arise from specific processes. Conservation Problems Related to the Materials and Techniques of Drawings focuses on the various materials used to create marks on paper. Item-Level Collection Protection: Envelopes, Sleeves, Folders, Enclosures, Mats, Boxes, Frames, and Furniture, discusses measures taken for prints and drawings so that they can better withstand the rigors of handling, examination, exhibition, travel, and adverse environmental conditions. Preventive Conservation for Prints and Drawings describes how the integration of a comprehensive Collections Care Program into a Collections Management Policy can reduce the need for item-level conservation treatments. Basic Paper Conservation Procedures provides instructions on how to stabilize damaged works. How to Make Starch Paste and Methyl Cellulose Adhesive and Suppliers of Paper Conservation Materials and Equipment are appended as well as a Glossary.

This book is the first introduction to Western art that not only considers how choice of materials can impact form, but also how objects in different media can alter in appearance over time, and the role of conservators in the preservation of our cultural heritage. The first four chapters cover wall and easel paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints, from the late Middle Ages to the present day. They examine, with numerous examples, how these works have been produced, how they might have been transformed, and how efforts regarding their preservation can sometimes be misleading or result in controversy. The final two chapters look at how photography, new techniques, and modern materials prompted innovative ways of creating art in the twentieth century, and how the rapid expansion of technology in the twenty-first century has led to a revolution in how artworks are constructed and seen, generating specific challenges for collectors, curators, and conservators alike. This book is primarily directed at undergraduates interested in art history, museum studies, and conservation, but will also be of interest to a more general non-specialist audience.

Prints and drawings have been keenly collected in Europe since at least the early sixteenth century. Relatively modest in price, they offered artists, amateurs and collectors of a systematic turn of mind the opportunity to put together holdings with a wide representation of different hands, schools and types of subject. Prints and drawings are traditionally treated separately, but their collecting is shown here to raise many interrelated issues. Employing a wide range of methodologies, the essays in this volume offer a number of innovative investigations into the collecting, perception, classication and display of works on paper.

"Beginning with an examination of drawing as part of the creative process, and showing how it reveals the artist's mind at work, the author explains in detail the materials and techniques used in Renaissance drawings. It also considers how drawings were used, how they changed stylistically through the period and how they varied in different regions of Italy. It concludes with a brief look at connoisseurship and collecting."--Amazon.

"The Grove Encyclopedia of Materials and Techniques deals with all aspects of materials, techniques, conservation, and restoration in both traditional and nontraditional media, including ceramics, sculpture, metalwork, painting, works on paper, textiles, video, digital art, and more. Drawing upon the expansive scholarship in The Dictionary of Art and adding new entries, this work is a comprehensive reference resource for artists, art dealers, collectors, curators, conservators, students, researchers, and scholars." "Similar in design to The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts, this one-volume reference work contains articles of various lengths in alphabetical order. The shorter, more factual articles are combined with larger, multi-section articles tracing the development of materials and techniques in various geographical locations. The Encyclopedia provides unparalleled scope and depth, and it offers fully updated articles and bibliography as well as over 150 illustrations and color plates." "The Grove Encyclopedia of Materials and Techniques offers scholarly information on materials and techniques in art for anyone who studies, creates, collects, or deals in works of art. The entries are written to be accessible to a wide range of readers, and the work is designed as a reliable and convenient resource covering this essential area in the visual arts."

Cabinets of prints and drawings are found in the earliest art collections of Early Modern Europe. From the sixteenth century onwards, some of them acquired such fame that the necessity for an ordered and scientific display meant that a dedicated keeper was occasionally employed to ensure that fellow enthusiasts, as well as visiting diplomats, courtiers and artists, might have access to the print room. Often collected and displayed together with drawings, the prints formed a substantial part of princely collections which sometimes achieved astounding longevity as a specialised group of collectibles, such as the Florentine Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe at the Uffizi (GDSU). Prints and drawings, both bought and commissioned, were collected by princes and by private amateurs. Like the rest of their collections, the prints and drawings were usually preserved and displayed as part of, or near, the owner’s library in close proximity to scientific instruments, cut gems or small sculptural works of art. Both prints and drawings not only documented an encyclopaedic approach to the knowledge available at the time, but also depicted parts of the collections in the form of a paper museum. Prints and drawings also served as a guide to the collections. They spread their fame, and the renown of their owners, across Europe and into new worlds of collecting, both East and West. This volume explores issues such as: when, how and why did cabinets of prints and drawings become a specialised part of princely and private collections? How important were collections of prints and drawings for the self-representation of a prince or connoisseur among specialists and social peers? Is the presentation of a picture hanging in a gallery, for example by Charles Eisen for the Royal Galleries at Dresden, to be treated as documentary evidence? Are there notable differences in the approach to collecting, presentation and preservation of prints and drawings in diverse parts of the world? What was the afterlife of such collections up to the present day?

This book is the seventh in the Readings in Conservation series, which gathers and publishes texts that have been influential in the development of thinking about the conservation of cultural heritage. The present volume provides a selection of more than ninety-five texts tracing the development of the conservation of works of art on paper. Comprehensive and thorough, the book relates how paper conservation has responded to the changing place of prints and drawings in society. The readings include a remarkable range of historical selections from texts such as Renaissance printmaker Ugo da Carpi’s sixteenth-century petition to the Venetian senate on his invention of chiaroscuro, Thomas Churchyard’s 1588 essay in verse “A Sparke of Frendship and Warme Goodwill,” and Robert Bell’s 1773 piece “Observations Relative to the Manufacture of Paper and Printed Books in the Province of Pennsylvania.” These are complemented by influential writings by such figures as A. H. Munsell, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida, along with a generous representation of recent scholarship. Each reading is introduced by short remarks explaining the rationale for its selection and the principal matters covered, and the book is supplemented with a helpful bibliography. This volume is an indispensable tool for museum curators, conservators, and students and teachers of the conservation of works of art on paper.