ARTH 6605 - [Art/Science Intersections: More than Meets the Eye]

Next offered 2017-2018. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Permission of instructor required. Co-meets with ARTH 4605/VISST 4605.

R. Johnson, L. Pincus, A. Weislogel.

This interdisciplinary seminar capitalizes on the extraordinary loan of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings from a private collection to the Johnson Museum, and an ongoing Mellon Foundation initiative to study them and other objects from the Museum’s collection, using both art-historical and scientific, data-driven modes of investigation. Both methods are invested in material culture: the communicative visible surface of the artwork and its underlying materials-support, ground, pigment. Within the context of early modern painting and works on paper, and drawing on Cornell’s exceptional resources and key experts, we will employ various technical methods, including thread counting of historic canvases, pattern matching in historic papers, and microscopic pigment analysis, and will look for hidden images in paintings through x-ray fluorescence mapping at Cornell’s synchrotron facility (CHESS).