In the June 2009 issue of this Magazine, the first of a series of articles was published that re-reviewed a selection of the most influential contributions to art history published in the twentieth century. That series was subsequently collected in a much-admired anthology.1 In this issue, we are beginning an equally ambitious project that extends much further chronologically – but, like the previous enterprise, attempts to capture the key episodes in a particular perspective on the art of the past. Here, we shall attempt to survey the history of the technical study and conservation of paintings through an examination of the principal players in this long, largely (but not exclusively) European narrative. Key individuals and groups will be identified and studied: their lives and contexts; details of their work and achievements, successes and challenges; their philosophies and principles; their influence and legacy. In compiling such a chronicle of conservators, scientists and art historians, we hope that the outlines of an essential ­discipline will become clear – an alternative historiography that addresses the material study, the preservation and the physical restoration of works of art.

Our aim is to construct a cumulative history circling around what has become known as ‘technical art history’, mainly through an examination of its most notable historical practitioners – even though most of them would never had dreamed of the expression, let alone used it to describe their work. Technical art history is a term of relatively recent invention that describes wide-­ranging investigations into the making of art, its materials and techniques, its physical ageing, its conservation and restoration. These aspects are all interdependent and so the history we are building here is a multivalent one, encompassing both technical studies and the theory and practice of conservation – and the story of an emerging, evolving profession. The journey from courtly artist-restorers in the seventeenth century to the museum scientist-conservators of today is the stupendous trajectory that we are aiming to map.

In this issue, we begin with the remarkable Sir Theodore ­Turquet de Mayerne, Huguenot physician to the Stuart kings James I and Charles I. His significance in the present context is that he not only recorded conversations about his own profession, medicine, but he also talked to painters, including Rubens and Van Dyck, making detailed notes of their materials and methods. De Mayerne represents a perfect paradigm for technical art history: not an artist, not a treatise-writer, but a dispassionate observer whose accuracy and reliability can be tested centuries later against the very objects he was writing about. Later, in the nineteenth century, a new golden age of textual and visual analysis flowered, as scholars unearthed information from both classic and obscure treatises and compared it to surviving works of art: the great, wonderfully literate protagonists of this period will be featured in this series.

Future articles will also present an overview of the whole ­history of restoration-conservation (the terminology evolves) by looking at some of the legendary names from the annals of the profession. All over Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, royal, princely and national collections fell, with varying degrees of success, under the care of the new breed of specialist restorers. Some of them had previously been, or continued to be, practising artists; others, essentially untrained, saw an opportunity and rushed to fill it. It was in this period that implacably opposing views as to the efficacy of picture restoration began to take hold – whether it was seen to be a process of preservation or destruction, whether it enriched or endangered the art of the past. This thread of strongly held but conflicting convictions runs through much of the writing that flourished around the ­burgeoning profession. Skilled, careful craftsmen recorded their work for posterity; innovators, experimenters, inventors published their often controversial new techniques for treating canvases and panels and painted surfaces. At the same time, flamboyant restorers described and justified their methods, often at the expense of the reputations of others; connoisseurs and collectors praised or decried the latest revelation. Artists weighed in too – usually on the side of clarity and cleanliness, but sometimes ­complaining of heavy-handed intrusion.

All this will appear in the story that will unfold in future ­articles: but there will be much more besides. We will look at theories of conservation ethics and aesthetics that provoked thoughtful debate in the early and mid-twentieth century: what to do about damaged or fragmentary works – to complete, to leave alone, or to steer some middle course? How did the painters of the past imagine that their works would age – how far can it be claimed that restorers and conservators respect the artists’ original intentions? The Burlington Magazine is no stranger to debates of that kind: the heated exchanges between Ernst Gombrich and the National Gallery sparked by the cleaning controversies of the 1960s and Pliny’s remark about ‘dark varnish’ still linger in the memory.2 We shall consider the rise of museum conservation and scientific departments in Europe and the United States, and their significance in the international development of conservation and technical studies and the harnessing of new technologies. Alongside these, professional organisations and training institutions have played a fascinating role in the advancement and refining of professional standards.

Finally, there will be a few articles devoted to famous works of art. The history we are charting can be told largely through the story of its human protagonists, but some celebrated paintings (perhaps regrettably) crop up again and again, to be subjected once more to the newest treatment, the most recent ethical ­opinions, the latest skills. A small selection of masterpieces with noteworthy conservation histories, such as the Ghent altarpiece, will complete our new history of conservation and technical studies that will appear in the Magazine in the months to come and, we hope, eventually in book form. We would like to thank our team of advisers for their expert help in planning the series and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for its generous and invaluable support.

1     R. Shone and J.-P. Stonard, eds.: The Books That Shaped Art History, London 2013. 
2     See the Editorial ‘The National Gallery Cleaning Controversy’, The Burlington Magazine 104 (1962), pp.49–50, and subsequent articles and correspondence in ibid., passim; and ibid., 105 (1963), passim.