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Oct 12, 2008 7:00 am US/Eastern
CBS 2 At The Met: Greek, Roman Galleries
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
Visit the Met's Greek and Roman Galleries and explore ancient art as detectives. It's all part of a new audio tour program at the museum called "Investigations: Art, Conservation and Science". Visitors need to spend a few extra bucks on an audio guide, and then look for the "I" on the label. They'll hear the art history side from museum curators, but also hear from researchers like Marco Leona, working behind the scenes discovering clues that tell even more of the story.
Leona explains to CBS 2's Dana Tyler. "I'm a scientist. I work here with a crew of other scientists and conservators at the museum. What we're interested in using scientific methods to really explore, in depth the works of art. Find out about their material aspects. How they were made. Who made them. Where the materials that were used came from. All of our Greek and Roman statues were painted. They were polychrome traces that would highlight the features. Just imagine almost like makeup!" They would have rosy cheeks. They would have red lips. They would have colorful hair, blonde with gold applied. Brown of course, we have pieces of eyelashes and eyebrows.
Leona says x-ray tools of all sizes are used behind closed doors at the Met, to explore the microscopic past of works like an old market woman from the first century A.D.
"This is one of the tools we use. It's an x-ray fluorescent spectrometer, it's the kind of tool you'd probably see in a CSI lab or in a military team. It's a completely safe instrument. It shoots a little bit of X-rays to the work of art and by looking at the x-ray that bounce back. We're not doing radiography, it's a chemical analysis. We can fingerprint the materials in the statue."
Leona continued. "These objects spent a lot of time in the sun and in the rain when they were still used in antiquity. So the paint would be lost and periodically it would be renewed, but imagine, after the fall of the Empire some of these objects would be in the ground. This is dirt and soil so and minerals that form on the surface of the rock because it had been underground."
A terra-cotta column actually illustrates what Leona and his colleagues are investigating in these galleries. Leona said, "You're looking at a snapshot of a Greek painter's workshop. What you see there is a painter intent on decorating a statue."
On the audio tour, visitors can punch in 2611. This is what they will hear: "We understand the painting process here to be the encaustic method. And this is a wax-based technique that's developed in the late 4th Century B.C. the same period as when the vase was created."
There are more than two dozen artworks throughout the museum on the Met's Investigations' tour. Just look for the "I" on the labels, and now you can put a face to the Met's detective work.
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