Making fragile panels last

In H.G. Wells's 1895 sci-fi novel ‘The Time Machine’, set in the year AD 802,701, the Time Traveller discovers a museum made of ‘a certain type of Chinese porcelain’ among the remnants of what once was London. This ancient museum in a distant future serves as a testament to human-made artifacts that have endured through time, reflecting the institutionalisation of conservation practices that began in the 18th and 19th centuries. In this domain, questions of durability have long been dominated by histories of collecting, preservation and repair.

But what of the initial impulse to make things that last? How did artisans explore durability as a making practice? This paper attends to this longer history of durability, which is not characterised by permanence or stability per se, but by looking forward. It focuses on how, through materials and making, artisans anticipated a future in which their objects, and for the purposes of this talk, panel paintings in particular, were meant to ‘endure.’ In other words, this paper explores artistic practice as the cultivation of anticipation.

Dr Marjolijn Bol is Associate Professor in Technical Art History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Trained as an art historian, her research intersects with historical studies of craft, heritage, knowledge and the environment, with a special focus on performative methods of reconstruction and written sources on art technology. Marjolijn’s recent publications include The Varnish and the Glaze: Painting Splendor with Oil', 1100–1500 (2023) and 'The Matter of Mimesis' (2023), co-edited with E. C. Spary. She is currently Principal Investigator on a major European Research Council-funded project writing a long-term history of the concept of durability in art from the perspective of artisans and patrons.

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