Art Technological Source Research Postprints Interim meeting Paris 2022

The ICOM-CC working group Art Technological Source Research celebrated its 20th birthday with the 9th Interim meeting hosted by the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne at the INHA Paris. A jubilee invited not only to look back, but also to look forward and critically reflect on the state of the art, the young field of Art Techological Source research being as much “work in progress” as the objects it studies. In particular this gave the opportunity of further reflection on the position of art technological source research in an interdisciplinary research on works of art. 

This meeting focused on the working process, on artists’s gestures and skills, on the manipulation of the material they used. Works of art were shaped by religious, semantic and aesthetic ideas as well as by political, social and economic context. But they were also defined by their material characteristics, by the skills of the artists and artisans who made them, by the tools they used and by traditions in manipulating these materials, tools or objects. In this perspective, art technological source research enriched our knowledge on artworks and our understanding of their creation. Going beyond mere material analysis, the exploration of written as well as oral sources allow us to contextualise stylistic, material and technical interpretation in art objects. Pictorial sources and tools tell us more about the artists’ skills and their methods of work. This meeting not only considered artworks in the time of their genesis and creation, but also their subsequent lives, as sources offer insights into uses of heritage objects, their manipulation in performative acts, their repurposing, restoration and adaptation to new concepts, activities, which again involve manual skills. 

The contributions from the interim meeting can be accessed on the ICOM-CC Publications Online Platform.