Here’s a lovely article to settle down with and read when you’ve the time. It was in today’s Calendar section of the LA Times. Ironically, having been hearing about this project for a while from Michael Quick (one of the principals in the article), and it being such a nice example of science and art (and scientists, artists, and art conservationists) working together, I’d actually been thinking of blogging about it at some point. Now, my work has been done for me, since Suzanne Muchnic has done an excellent job, in the article, entitled ” A cabinet, an egg and an antibody”.
You can read the full article on the LA Times’ site. To tease you a bit into reading it, here’s a bit of the story. There’s a quite dramatic 17th Century cabinet, by furniture maker André-Charles Boulle and gilder Jean Varin, which is part of the Getty’s collection (picture above right is from the J. Paul Getty Museum). You may well have seen it if you’ve been to the Getty, or perhaps its cousin, which is in Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland. Scholars have been puzzled by the appearance of the figures of Hercules and Hippolyta for some time. They’re rather starkly white. This was as a result of restorers in 1977 removing several outer layers which had been thought to have been not the original finish. It was later determined that this white layer was actually a primer layer, and certainly not the intended finish. They set out to determine (by comparison with the other piece, located in Scotland) exactly what the properties of the orginal finish were, and what techniques were used to render it.
Several standard techniques from modern science that are used in art history, conservation, and restoration (such as electron microscopy, gas chromatography, and mass spectrometry) were employed (by Getty Art Conservator Arlen Heginbotham and the scientists at the Getty Conservation Institute), but there was a puzzling set of layers that these techniques could not help with. The layers were determined to be organic, but their nature unknown. A hypothesis was raised that the principal component might be egg-white, but some way was needed to test this. This method also needed to be very sensitive, for they only had trace amounts of the material to work with. This is where Arlen called in Michael Quick, a USC faculty colleague of mine in the department of Biology, (who’s recently become Dean of Research).
The idea was to use molecular biology techniques used and refined in modern biology labs to tackle the problem. If you’ve got animal proteins in a sample somewhere, you can use antibodies to detect it. So they worked together on this and other techniques to surmount the challenges involved in making this technique give useful information – such as tagging the targeted protein with a flourescent molecule (that binds to a secondary antibody) allowing immuno-flourescence microscopy to be employed to image the protein once it was found.
Suzanne Muchnic describes all of this and more in detail (including some of the basic science, as related by Michael Quick in the article) in the article, so do have a read of it. USC undergraduate student Vicky Millay (strangely not mentioned in the LA Times article, sadly, but mentioned in Eva Emerson’s article available here) works in the Quick Lab, and did a lot of the lab work required to make this a success.
A nice aspect of this story is its illustration of the march forward of several techniques in molecular biology. Note that the techniques that were used are now standard ones in that field, even though they were thought of as novel not so long ago. Furthermore, the technique of using antibodies in this sort of art conservation/restoration area had been played with before (in the 60s) but back then the techniques were nowhere near as refined, and also there simply were not enough antibodies available do that kind of work. Now of course, the “library” of available antibodies is much larger, due to the explosion of research in molecular biology and biochemistry. So this could now become a standard technique in the field of art conservation, given the wide use of organic materials in pigments and other art materials.
-cvj
September 4th, 2005 at 1:34 pm
Hi Clifford,
I find these kind of articles extremely interesting for the relationship that can be drawn of historical perspective versus curent scientific leanings. To just to mention a few that I had taken notice of is, Picasso and Einstein, Escher and Penrose, and one below you might find of interest as well.
Piece Depicts the Cycle of Birth, Life, and Death-Origin, Indentity, and Destiny by Gabriele Veneziano
the Myth of the Beginning of Time
The new willingness to consider what might have happened before the big bang is the latest swing of an intellectual pendulum that has rocked back and forth for millenia. In one form or another, the issue of the ultimate beginning has engaged philosophers and theologians in nearly every culture. It is entwined witha grand set of concerns, one famosly encapsulated in a 1897 painting by Paul Gauguin: D’ou venons? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous? Scientific America, The Time before Time, May 2004
I would even suggest that cubists art had a interesting correlation to membrane(quantum gravity) imaging used in the monte carlo method here.
Art Mirrors Physics Mirrors Art, by Stephen G. Brush
Arthur Miller addresses an important question: What was the connection, if any, between the simultaneous appearance of modern physics and modern art at the beginning of the 20th century? He has chosen to answer it by investigating in parallel biographies the pioneering works of the leaders of the two fields, Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso. His brilliant book, Einstein, Picasso, offers the best explanation I have seen for the apparently independent discoveries of cubism and relativity as parts of a larger cultural transformation. He sees both as being focused on the nature of space and on the relation between perception and reality.
http://www.physicstoday.com/pt/vol-54/iss-12/p49.html
I am sure Lee Smolin might find this perspective quite interesting?
September 4th, 2005 at 3:16 pm
Interesting. Thanks Plato. -cvj
September 4th, 2005 at 4:40 pm
Love the title of Muchnic’s article, and the fact that this is another example of how scientific research can contribute to culture and technology in ways we cannot imagine when we first set out to understand how nature works (yes, I’ve written many letters to Congress to encourage them to restore funding for basic research in astrophysics over the past 2 years).
And the Getty is one of the loveliest places I’ve been to, I spent a lot of time there when I was in school…for me it was enough to sit on the marble terrace next to the fountains and think for a couple of hours, I only went inside to see one of my favorite paintings. But, had I seen this cabinet, I would have been struck by the contrast of the white figures…I find it very beautiful as is, but I imagine it is much more harmonious when the figures take on their intended colors…very nice post Clifford….
September 4th, 2005 at 4:57 pm
Thanks Jennifer! I’ll be certainly doing more posts on places like the Getty and other interesting things and places around the city and the Southwest, from time to time. I’m particularly pleased by the nature tof tha collaboration between the Getty and USC, and you are certainly right that it is an excellent example of the unexpected “cross-border” benefits of research in another field, as we’d discussed on another thread.
Cheers,
-cvj
September 4th, 2005 at 8:11 pm
Wow, look at that thing. Baroque trash at its spine-tingling worst.
September 5th, 2005 at 11:25 am
On the surface, without further looking, it could have circumvented idealizations for sure?
On deeper inspection, the article reflects itself, to the issues with life in general around Aldebergers dimensional measures in analogy. Idealizations, experimentally driven. At least it seems this way to me.
AS well, the story of the Red Violin, it’s construction, as it took shape in my mind as well.
From article Clifford links:
Eventually he hit upon the possibility of egg white, sometimes used as a sealer. That idea produced a “eureka” moment. The physical appearance was right. But Heginbotham had to prove that egg white actually was the mystery material.
September 5th, 2005 at 11:42 am
To Lee’s point of view He might of liked Lakoff then?
But to steal Baez’s demonstrated quote on his site:
Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature. – Hermann Weyl
Maybe artistically Mona Lisa’s Smile (remember the trampoline?), can be seen from different perspectives, as inviting the observers direct experience, with such maths?
October 14th, 2005 at 7:31 pm
[...] Last week I was in the same position. I invited Nathan Lewis from Caltech to come and tell us about The Scientific Challenges for Sustainable Energy Policy. Again, hugely interdisciplinary and of great interest at the highest levels too, given how it ties together so many departments and schools on campus. I upgraded the whole thing to a campus event which meant extra emails, extra food (raided Trader Joes for excellent good value cookies, to save our budget), and extra stress. I spoke about the organisational aspects of that in an earlier post, and I’ll talk about the content of his talk in a short while, as it was excellent, and everyone was buzzed! Which sort of makes this all worth it. That and getting to try out Cafe Pinot afterwards, chatting with some Department heads from Chemical, and Material Science Engineering, and our Dean of Research, Michael Quick (about whom I’ve blogged not so long ago), and trying out an excellent dish of duck, with interesting conversation and an affordable wine… a combination which was quite agreeable. [...]
January 20th, 2006 at 11:04 am
Hi Clifford:
Enjoyed your piece. You might also be interested in the art-science link in Arlen Heginbotham’s use of numerous scientific methods to establish the authenticity of a 16th century French chest (long considered a fake) in the Getty collection. There is now both an exhibit and a url.
Best wishes.
Stan
http://getty.edu/art/exhibitions/cabinet/
January 20th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
Thanks Stan!
-cvj