deteriorated. In early 2010, a new composite hanging was installed. Over three years, textile conservator Tess Fredette and historic upholsterer Gisele Haven led a team that hand-embroidered new flame stitch panels, thus restoring the installation’s ensemble and Hercules’s heroic placement. Terracotta Sculptures In 2010, Gardner Museum conservators completed detailed
study and conservation of three of the Museum’s terracotta sculptures. Funded by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, and using a range of evaluation methods, such as x-radiography and scanning electron microscopy–energy dispersive spectroscopy, the work focused on analysis of paint and the elemental constituents of terracotta from different regions of Italy, providing new insights into the objects’ composition and condition. This research contributed to the 2010 exhibition Modeling Devotion: Terracotta Sculptures of the Italian Renaissance. In conjunction with the special exhibition, the Museum hosted a study day for curators, art historians, and conservators. Museum staff and guest speakers presented papers on the subject of polychrome terracotta sculpture and the group examined and discussed sculpture in the Gardner’s special exhibition and in the galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Venetian Senator In 2009–2010, Gardner Museum objects conservator Jessica
Cholros led the cleaning of the 18th-century Venetian Senator, one of the Museum’s marble busts, which had become dull and sullied. Cholros determined that laser cleaning, a 40-year-old practice that uses lasers’ infrared wavelengths to agitate some particles while leaving others entirely unaffected, would be the best conservation method. By February of 2010, the bust was returned to its location: the senator had the floor again. Namban Chest The mid-17th-century Japanese Namban chest, which Isabella
Stewart Gardner purchased in Venice, Italy, in 1906, was one of the first Titian Room pieces to be selected for conservation treatment. Over time, and with exposure to light, the decorative lacquer, a naturally durable polymer, had begun to deteriorate, developing water sensitivity, microscopic surface cracking, a loss of gloss, fading of colors, and detachment from the wood substrate in areas. The conservation treatment was undertaken by Jessica Chloros and supervised by Holly Salmon. The treatment included stabilizing the unstable lacquer and cleaning mother-of-pearl inlays and metal mounts.
PHILIP IV OF SPAIN Throughout 2010, Gianfranco Pocobene undertook a major restoration campaign of Philip IV of Spain (1628) by Diego Velázquez and Workshop, removing a darkened polyvinyl-acetate varnish coating and badly discolored restorations from the previous treatment, in 1948. Restoration included in-painting of losses and areas where earlier restorations proved difficult to remove and also the application of new varnish coating. Conservators restored the painting’s frame, cleaning and in-painting its gilding. Technical analysis of the painting revealed important information about its creation, especially the presence of a red earth ground layer applied to the canvas prior to the execution of portrait, which dates the work to the 1620s and gives the painting its warm tonality.
STOUT CONSERVATION LECTURES Held each year in honor of George L. Stout, Director of the Gardner Museum from 1955–1970 and one of the founders of the modern discipline of art conservation, the Stout Memorial Lecture celebrates excellence in the preservation and understanding of cultural patrimony. 2009 T.K. McClintock and John L. Stubbs, Rebuilding the Fragments of a Dream: The Conservation of Juanqinzhai, on coordinating conservation and restoration work within the Forbidden City 2010 Terry Drayman-Weisser, Recovery and Protection of Artifacts in Iraq, on international efforts to establish a conservation program in Ebril, Iraq
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