Introduction: Cabinet, elaboratory, gallery 1500–1800. The preservation of art and material culture in Europe

Abstract

Conservation practice, material exploration and their respective ‘scientific’ rationales were not confined to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They also existed in the early modern and modern periods. The papers in this special issue seek to challenge the idea that these types of physical and intellectual interactions with collected objects only emerged in the Industrial Age. Great scientific advances in conservation and related materials analysis were made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by various museum directors, conservators and chemists, and with them the evolution of prominent conservation theories. But these achievements have become disproportionately represented in the growing literature on the history of conservation and have served to dominate the narrative. The idea for this special issue developed from a one-day online conference held in 2021, organized by Morwenna Blewett at the Ashmolean Museum. Lucy Wrapson chaired a panel session and made closing remarks, drawing together the interrelationships between seven diverse papers, which tackled the preservation of art and material culture at a wide range of places and dates. The papers highlight the themes that were right at the heart of the early development of the Ashmolean Museum in the seventeenth century, and were so very clearly in train the century before. Among them are: material investigation; preservation; debates around damage; deterioration; loss compensation; documentation; and the very function and purpose of conservation and preservation. All these considerations motivated interpositions that were certainly not ‘unscientific’. The shadow of achievements in the history of conservation history, stemming from the nineteenth century, serves to cement and provide a compelling origin story, particularly for those who played a traceable and autobiographical part in those events. And, if we look closely, we can see this tendency emerging in the comments of some of the indisputably accomplished figures of the twentieth century. A typical example comes as late as 1978, when Harold Plenderleith, the chemist, archaeologist and conservator who had worked at