Things have gotten especially interesting around here (see my Museum post “Exodus”, from May 28) and I haven’t had a chance to update you on the Tang Horses. Our Chinese colleagues left us on May 28th, having accomplished great things in a very short time. As I told them, they did in three weeks what [...]
In her introduction to the Museum Blog, Amy Ellsworth says, “Now you can follow us through the fourth wall, into our laboratories, storage areas, and offices to see how the Museum works.” Well, this view isn’t always pretty. Take the last week…. Late last Friday, a whole lot of the staff got emails saying that [...]
Remember this image from our work plan way back when (two weeks ago)? Well, we’ve now done the fills marked in green and decided that some of the ones marked in red should be green and did those. So, what’s left: the big fills colored yellow here, which we’ve been thinking hard about. The fills [...]
Our Chinese colleagues and Julie have diligently filling the minor voids along the join lines in the main segments. They use a mixture of an acrylic resin, glass microballoons, stone powder from a quarry near Xi’an, and dry artists pigments. The results are wonderful, as can be seen in the accompanying example. The joins are [...]
On Wednesday a team from China Central television came to do a story on the collaboration between Chinese conservators and American conservators, working together to preserve the Tang Horses. They interviewed everyone but the horses!
Among the many things our Chinese colleagues brought with them from Xi’an were two plaster fragments. These were exact replicas of stone fragments that had been excavated from the Zhaoling Mausoleum site in 2003. One of these was found to belong with C 396, forming the raised front part of the saddle. This exciting find [...]
After the short break for Penn’s Commencement, we hit the ground running on Tuesday. After our tests of various mixtures for the filling of the small fills (green lines on picture in previous post), we were ready to actually work on the horse reliefs. We wanted to get a better idea of how long this [...]
This weekend was Commencement at Penn, which meant we couldn’t work in the Rotunda on Friday afternoon or all day Monday. On Friday, the Chinese conservators took a very quick trip to Washington, DC, which they enjoyed very much even though they didn’t have much time there. On Sunday, we had lunch with Mr & [...]
We have spent the last few days reviewing our plans for filling the gaps and our colleagues have been experimenting with materials to do the first part of the filling. Julie and I had identified three sorts of fills to be done: structural fills of large missing areas (yellow in photograph); small cosmetic fills along [...]
Yesterday we welcomed our five colleagues from China who will be helping us with the final restoration phase of the conservation project. Sponsored by the Shaanxi Tang Daming Palace Heritage Site Preservation Foundation, they will be in the US for approximately four weeks. We spent the day getting to know one another and discussing our [...]
