Category:Conservation

By: Lynn Grant

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 […]

By: Lynn Grant

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 […]

By: Lynn Grant

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 & […]

By: Lynn Grant

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 […]

By: Lynn Grant

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 […]

By: Lynn Grant

Well, last week was pretty exciting.  The armature arrived on Tuesday in small enough bundles to actually be manageable.  On Wed. morning, Harry Gordon, the rigger arrived with 3 helpers, a loaded flatbed truck with boom crane and a very full cargo van.  Unloading took about 2 hours, not helped by a misbehaving freight elevator […]

By: Lynn Grant

Once the reliefs had been mended into their three main segments each, we were able to schedule the re-installation for early May. To prepare for it, Julie did some final cleaning and the riggers came back for a day to lift up the five base pieces so we going insert epoxy putty under them to […]

By: Lynn Grant

Finally, in February, it was time to start putting the reliefs back together.  There were three levels of joining: small mends; medium mends, and major mends.  For us conservators, the medium and major mends had been a matter of discussion since the earliest phases of the project.  Our original plan was to use reversible adhesives […]

By: Lynn Grant

While cleaning continued, we began planning for the new armature that would support and stabilize the reliefs.  Since August, when we got accurate weights on all the pieces, it had been clear that we could not put the reliefs back together permanently as each relief weighed approximately 9000 lbs and we would not be able […]

By: Lynn Grant

After a long and fraught hunt, we located a rigging firm with art experience and the right equipment for our problem pieces (a cantilever gantry). But they were completely booked for the next six weeks, so we weren’t able to disassemble and move the reliefs until the end of August. We still had no idea […]