2023 Brodsky Series for the Advancement of Library Conservation Lecture

Nancy K. Turner, Conservator of Manuscripts in the Department of Paper Conservation at the J. Paul Getty Museum, will present at the Syracuse University Libraries’ annual Brodsky Series for the Advancement of Library Conservation. The hybrid lecture, titled “Materials of the Illuminator’s Art: Medieval Recipes, Modern Identifications, and the Preservation of Pigments, Dyes, and Metals in Medieval Manuscripts,”  is being held on March 29, 2023, from 3:30-5:00 at Bird Library’s Peter Graham Scholarly Commons as well as on Zoom. All events are open to the public. Register to attend the lecture. 

This lecture will survey the medieval illuminators’ pigment palette across five centuries, as identified by various technical and analytical means and with reference to medieval technical treatises. The materials used by manuscript illuminators, including pigments, dyes, and metals, while relatively limited in number, were deployed by illuminators in staggeringly varied ways to achieve a wide range of painterly effects over the centuries. By highlighting the high degree of mastery and deep knowledge of these materials by manuscript painters working from the tenth to the early sixteenth centuries, this lecture will feature new discoveries in the conservation lab and ongoing technical research that continue to reveal secrets of the illuminator’s art and inform the methods of their preservation.

Please contact mlwagh@syr.edu by March 20 if ASL services or other accommodations are needed.