Conservation Confidential: Scaling Up

Check out today’s Conservation Confidential, Scaling Up: Treating Monumental Architecture with Julia Commander, Alice and Herbert Sachs Egyptian Collections Conservator. Get to know the museum’s Conservation Lab Annex and the big things going on there.

You can also catch up with other posts in this series here.

Shades of the Past

By Julia Commander, Jessica Betz Abel, and Anna O’Neill

We’ve shared a few insights into the monumental limestone we’ve been treating at our Conservation Lab Annex (CLA). You may have noticed a consistent color scheme: tan. The surfaces of the doorways are intricately carved and decorated with faience inlay, although we mainly see a variety of neutral tones.

Doorway 1 in the lab

To get a sense of how these architectural elements would have looked when they were made in Memphis, Egypt around 1213–1203 BCE, it helps to understand the materials and their state of deterioration. Luckily, the Penn Museum Archives has extensive records from the 1920’s Memphis excavations, which provides some further clues about these objects.

Searching through archival materials, we found detailed notes about each object as it was excavated, as well as extensive watercolor illustrations. We can see brilliant colors in the drawings and notes referencing traces of paint and inlay material.

Archival illustrations of Merenptah columns
Archival illustrations of Merenptah columns

We even see that the doorways are illustrated with brilliant blue and teal colors.

Archival illustrations of Merenptah palace doorways
Archival illustrations of Merenptah palace doorways

Some of the illustrations appear to extrapolate data from small traces of material. Do these colorful illustrations line up with what we’re seeing now in the material itself?

To explore a little further, we brought the Crimescope out to CLA to investigate using multispectral imaging. This technique has been discussed on the blog before, and we were particularly interested in infrared (IR) imaging of the faience inlay. While there are different types of faience material, some types related to Egyptian blue pigment produce the same luminescent response induced by visible light.

Searching for IR luminescence pointed us to a tiny area of inlay in the upper corner lintel fragment. The tip of one stripe glowed brightly, which corresponds to a pale green color that’s visible in normal lighting.

Visible light (VIS)
Visible-induced infrared luminescence (VIL)
Detail with VIS/VIL overlay

This result suggests that we’re seeing a deteriorated state of formerly bright blue/green/teal faience. While we did not see every trace of the degraded inlay light up in infrared imaging, this small hint corroborates what we’re seeing in the archival illustrations.

We plan to continue using multispectral imaging to explore decorated surfaces when we’re back at CLA. Stay tuned!

But this warehouse is Just Right

By Lynn Grant

Penn Museum’s Conservation Department is charged with reviewing, documenting, and stabilizing every artifact that goes on exhibition in the Museum. Most of the time, the objects tend to be in the ‘smaller than a breadbox’ (if you don’t recognize that category, check out this article) and are dealt with fairly expeditiously, especially once our labs were renovated in 2014. Before that, larger objects were a challenge, which was one factor in turning a gallery space into the Artifact Lab.  Even with the renovated lab, working on large objects (large textiles, eagle feather bonnets, carved elephant tusks) requires negotiating with colleagues – or sometimes just having a group session to free up the space as quickly as possible. 

Four conservators working on one carved elephant tusk to reduce the time it monopolized that working space.

But then there’s the ‘Wayyyyy bigger than a breadbox category”, aka monumental artifacts – too big to bring into lab. Sometimes we’ve dealt with this by bringing the lab to the artifact (Tang Taizong, Buddhist murals, Kaipure, the Sphinx).

Conservator Julie Lawson cleaning the Tang Taizong horse reliefs in the gallery.

For the renovation of our Ancient Egyptian and Nubian galleries, though, the sheer number of monumental artifacts, including parts of a Pharaonic palace was (nearly) overwhelming.

Fortunately, planning began early. When we assessed all the various pieces, we came out with three categories: 1) can fit into lab; 2) too large for lab but not too large to leave building; and 3) too large for lab and too large to leave building. This last category included pieces that were too large and/or heavy for our current freight elevator and loading dock. We ended up closing the Museum’s Lower Egyptian Gallery in the summer of 2018 to permit the objects in Category 3 to be treated in situ.

NYU Conservation Center graduate student Adrienne Gendron working on a column drum from the Palace Complex of Merenptah in our Lower Egyptian gallery.

This was not an ideal situation, not only because it deprived visitors of access to those objects longer than we hoped; but also because the space is not very suitable and would be adjacent to or part of a construction site for the next 5 years. However, you can’t argue with physics. Well, you can, you just won’t win.

For artifacts in Category 2, we needed to find a space where we could store them and do the necessary conservation and reconstruction for the new installation. This was not an easy search and the University’s Facilities and Real Estate Services (FRES) were instrumental in helping us with the hunt. We needed a facility that was large enough to store the objects; had ceilings high enough to accommodate the re-erection of the large architectural elements; was secure or could be made so; could be adapted as a conservation work space; and was within an easy commute from the Museum. The hunt was long and hard: either the ceiling wasn’t high enough or the distance from the Museum too far or the neighborhood was too iffy, or there weren’t big enough loading docks to load/unload our monumental babies.

We finally located a space we agreed could be made to work – about 50 minutes from the Museum but it was big enough, had the ceiling height, had three loading docks – one of which was big enough to bring the truck inside (you really don’t want to be unloading Egyptian limestone in the rain), and it had areas that could be adapted as lab/office spaces.

Home sweet warehouse.
This shot shows our storage area as we first saw it (left) and as it was when we took possession (right).

We started moving artifacts out to the Conservation Lab Annex (CLA) last year and began serious conservation work in September.  I’ll let our CLA team introduce you to their space and their work in upcoming blog posts.