The beautifully renovated Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has opened its doors to the public in 2013. To celebrate this event the Rijksmuseum will host a three-day Symposium on Historical Painting Techniques.
The central theme of the Symposium will be the technical study of historically used painting techniques, the historical painting materials, their origin and trade, and their application in the painters workshop.
This symposium will be the fifth in a series of very successful meetings that started in Prague in 1993, followed by a meeting in Leiden in 1995, and continued by the IIC congress in Dublin in 1998 and the National Gallery meeting in London in 2009.
As considerable developments continue to take place in the field of ‘technical art history’, we hope to show the advances that are being made in the study of the material aspects of paintings. The Symposium will provide a podium for the effective dissemination and fruitful discussion of new work.
We strongly encourage interdisciplinary collaboration between art historians, conservators, and scientists. Contributions discussing technical findings, documentary evidence and analytical results, in relation to art historical questions are particularly appreciated. We emphatically invite art historians to attend, but also welcomed relevant contributions from other disciplines, such as source research, conservation science, the history of science and technology, history of trade and trade routes, historical mining, metallurgy, pharmacy.
The program should prove of interest to academic scholars and students as well as museum professionals, curators, conservators, art historians and scientists.
Contributions to the Symposium will be presented, either as oral presentations or as posters. These original contributions relate to the materials and methods of painting from the Middle Ages until the beginning of the 20th Century.
For relevant information on the symposium, please address to our website: http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/painting-techniques.
The oral and poster presentations held at the Symposium may be published as Postprints in both electronic and printed form. All contributions will be anonymously peer-reviewed by members of the reviewing committee.