Director’s Foreword

Lentz, Thomas W.

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Director’s Foreword

Thomas W. Lentz

Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych

~~INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES to the study of art are at the core of the mission of the Harvard University Art Museums. In its wide range of research and teaching activities, any university museum will draw on a multitude of examination methods and art historical discourses. The exhibition Prayers and Portraits:...

Author

Thomas W. Lentz

PublisherHarvard Art Museums

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00045.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-18127

Director’s Foreword

Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of art are at the core of the mission of the Harvard University Art Museums. In its wide range of research and teaching activities, any university museum will draw on a multitude of examination methods and art historical discourses. The exhibition Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych and its accompanying publications are a striking example of how fruitful such scholarly collaborations can be when a research and study project is conceived as an interdisciplinary collaboration.

The diptych format has a long and varied history, but its use increased markedly in Early Netherlandish painting. Artists such as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Hans Memling used the diptych to produce some of the most celebrated works in Northern Renaissance painting. The thirteen studies published in Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych examine the historical, cultural, material, and geographical contexts of the format in the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Their subjects range from iconography to reception history, and from the practical use of these objects in private devotion to the socioeconomic incentives for the donors who commissioned them. The close relationship of the Netherlandish devotional portrait diptych to manuscript illuminations is examined, and the application of the format is compared with that in other regions, such as France, Germany, and Italy. The editors of this volume, John Oliver Hand, curator of Northern Renaissance paintings at the National Gallery of Art, and Ron Spronk, associate curator for research at the Harvard University Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation, who also cocurated the exhibition at the Koninklijk Museum voor Kunsten in Antwerp and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., are to be commended for bringing together such an array of complementary approaches.

At the foundation of this project lies a unique technical investigation of more than sixty-five paintings that brought a team of four researchers to nine museums in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States. All paintings were typically examined and documented using a variety of techniques including dendrochronology, infrared reflectography, macrophotography in the visible and infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, binocular microscopy, and X-radiography. Drawing on the support of hundreds of colleagues, the research team, under the enthusiastic leadership of Ron Spronk, gathered an enormous amount of documentation in digital form, totaling two hundred gigabytes of high-quality images. In this respect, the project can serve as a model for the close collaboration between institutions.

Findings from technical examinations are often critical for the further study of individual works as well as for our understanding of how certain types of paired paintings worked together. Some, for example, turned out to be paired only in the nineteenth century, and certain types of paired images never functioned as folding diptychs but were pendant paintings. These findings are discussed at length in the essays and entries of the exhibition’s catalogue, Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych. The research team also provided the authors of the essays in the present volume with the documentation from their technical examinations. Though neither hinged or slipcased, Prayers and Portraits and Essays in Context thus complement and augment one another and function as a closely related pair themselves.

It is most fitting that this project was initiated by the Harvard University Art Museums. From the earliest beginnings of the teaching of fine arts at Harvard in the 1870s, direct and intimate contact with works of art has been an integral part of the curriculum. Throughout the Art Museums’ more than one hundred years of existence, the collections of the Fogg Art Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum have played a key role in the education of Harvard’s art history students. Generations of museum professionals were trained through the Fogg’s Museum Course, where matters of connoisseurship and museum management were studied alongside condition and restoration, studio practice, and material analysis. This manner of teaching art history became known as the “Fogg Method” and established a model for university art museums in the United States as well as in Europe.

Under the directorship of Edward W. Forbes, the Department for Technical Studies was established in 1928. The Fogg Art Museum was the first museum in the United States to constitute an independent department for conservation research. This department (renamed the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies in 1996) would be a key factor in establishing conservation science as a new academic discipline in the United States. An early model for successful multidisciplinary research, the department’s initial staff consisted of an art historian, a radiographer, a chemist, and a restorer. Through this combination of disciplines, the department was able to integrate various new scientific techniques that came into use in the first half of the twentieth century, and to play a crucial role in the initial systematization of methods of material analysis, the development of innovative conservation techniques, and the early professionalization of the discipline.

It is within this long and rich tradition that Ron Spronk’s initial ideas for a research and exhibition project on Netherlandish diptychs came to fruition. The project’s success is also a direct result of the Straus Center’s internal interdisciplinary organization, since, in addition to its conservators and conservation scientists, it has two technical art historians who work as research curators under the directorship of Henry Lie.

The Harvard University Art Museums are deeply grateful to the Getty Foundation, the Parnassus Foundation, and to an anonymous friend of the Harvard Art Museums for providing the necessary funds for this research project and for the publication of this volume. We also thank Raphael and Jane Bernstein, Ambassador J. William Middendorf II, and Bert Twaalfhoven for their continuing support of Ron Spronk’s work at the Straus Center.

Thomas W. Lentz
Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director
Harvard University Art Museums

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