As a paintings conservator and scholar, I am interested in the compound nature of artworks as things, images, and bearers of meaning. This navigation between the physical and the metaphysical guides my teaching, research, and conservation practice.
Though my conservation experience is broad and has included objects from many areas of the world, spanning from antiquity to the present, my expertise lies in the materials and treatment of Western paintings, with a particular focus in the Italian Renaissance. The craft of conservation, both its aesthetic and structural aspects, grounds and informs my scholarship. My research into individual pictures thus considers their facture and condition and seeks to situate these findings historically and hermeneutically. I am also interested in the history and theory of conservation, particularly the traces that restoration leaves on the artwork and in the archive, and the relationship between a painting’s changing appearance over time and its art historical interpretations.
My book The Renaissance Restored: Paintings conservation and the birth of modern art history in nineteenth-century Europe traces the reciprocal intersections of art history writing and paintings restoration at this seminal moment in historiography through the lens of artists and institutions. The book proposes a model for conservation history that is object focused yet enriched by the consideration of a wider cultural horizon, as reconstructed using period texts, unpublished archival materials, historical photographs, and modern scientific studies. My current book project is a critical edition of one of the first publications on conservation, Christian Philipp Koester’s Über Restauration alter Oelgemälde (1827-30). More than a treatise, Koester’s text captures ethical and theoretical reflections that are of continued relevance.
At the Institute, I teach courses on paintings conservation, painting materials, technical studies, and conservation history. In the Conservation Center’s Kress Program in Paintings Conservation, I instruct in the examination, stabilization, and restoration of paintings, primarily European works from the dispersed Kress Collection now owned by museums throughout the United States. This series of classes emphasizes the moment of restoration as an opportunity for close study and a critical act. I also teach courses on the history of artists’ materials and methods that incorporate scientific investigation, technical art history, assessments of condition, and connoisseurship concerns. I am eager to explore new ways of framing technical studies and of working collaboratively.
Before coming to the Institute, I was a conservator in private practice and at museums in New York and Austria, including The Pietro Edwards Society for Art Conservation, the Atelier Gerhard Walde, the Albertina, the Collections of the Prince of Liechtenstein, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
