On the basis of the development of a database of recipes and techniques we are able to create a historical semantic map of ‘technique’. The meaning of the notion of technique is complex and complicated by demarcations of the fields of ‘art’ and ‘science’ and with the relationships between the sciences and the humanities. One of the results of the scrutiny of diverse texts from Winckelmann, Kant and Goethe, among others, is that it brings to light that the notion of ‘Technik’ arose in connection to a process of distinction between processes of making and the works of art themselves in the eighteenth century. They relate to dichotomies between hand and mind which haunt technical art history to this day.
To assess the role of texts and manuals in the acquisition and transmission of skills in the early modern arts (painting, metalworking, and glass-making), we have combined traditional historical methods with historical reenactment. We have shown that the textual transmission of craft knowledge depended upon, rather than threatened, established routes to craft learning, such as apprenticeships. We have shown how these texts are the product of re-organization of knowledge gathered from artisans over a period of several centuries, and identified strategies which authors followed to write down artisanal knowledge with an eye towards making their texts useful for the transmission of technique. Methodologically, we have developed sustained, interdisciplinary reflection on re-enactment (or reconstruction) across the humanities and social sciences.
We have studied the emerging cultures of expertise in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the collaborations and conflicts between conservators, chemists and art historians, to understand who was considered an expert in the arts, and for which reasons. It sheds new light on the development of a science-based conservation practice and the emergence of art history as a ‘science of art’ (or ‘Kunstwissenschaft’), focusing on the period between the final years of the nineteenth century which saw the establishment of the first museum laboratory in Berlin and groundbreaking international conferences on art history and conservation held in pre-World War I Germany, and the 1940s when, from the ruins of World War II, new institutions such as the Istituto Centrale del Restauro emerged, which would shape the post-war art and conservation world. We have paid particular attention to the process by which the British Museum Laboratory became a permanent facility in the years between 1919 and 1934 to assess the role of museum laboratories in the history of conservation.
