Art-Historical Example
The compositional data (or "fingerprint") of stone from a sculpture become part of the Limestone Database which currently comprises more than 2200 analyses. Analyzed samples come from sculptures in museum collections, from quarries in the Ile-de-France, Normandy, Burgundy, Périgord and the Nile Valley, as well as from French monuments and British cathedrals. Compositional information in the database is used to group sculptures and relate them to quarry stone by multivariate statistical procedures.
HEAD OF AN ANGEL, an example
Head of an Angel, Paris, ca. 1250
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Cloisters Collection (1990.132).
(Photo: The Metroplitan Museum of Art)
According to art historians, the limestone Head of an Angel, acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1990, is a fine example of thirteenth-century Parisian sculpture.
To test their hypothesis, a very small sample of its stone, taken from an inconspicuous spot, was analyzed by neutron activation to determine the stone's composition. When the analytical results are compared with those for a group of sculptures from the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Paris (see diagram), the composition of the head and the cathedral sculpture are seen to match closely.
(Click here for diagram)
In the diagram the line represents the "fingerprint" of stone from Notre-Dame Cathedral. The triangular points, which represent the fingerprint of the Head of an Angel, correspond to that line, showing the similarity in composition of stone from the Head to that of the Cathedral.
Other points on the graph demonstrate that stone from the Head of a Virtue at the Duke University Museum of Art and a segment of a choir screen, now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, also match the compositional profile of sculptures from Notre-Dame.
This website presents records from a database of more than 2,000 samples for limestone sculptures and quarries, with pictures of more than 900 of them. The page about the sculpture of the Angel's Head provides one example.
Access to the data:
The data is presented in two basic forms:
- web pages that show data and (sometimes) pictures for a single sample, like this one;
- tables showing all the data, formatted for Microsoft Excel, without pictures, on the Download page.
The two forms present the same data. The meanings of the data fields are described for both descriptions and concentrations.
The left-hand menu provides two ways to access the single-sample web pages. For a broad view of the samples, grouped by the institutions that hold the related objects, click the drop-down arrow on the Browse page. The first choice in that list ("All Institutions") records all the samples, giving the new user a decent overview of the scope. The Search page allows you to find records that you already know exist, based on the records' contents.
Pictures:
The pictures and permission to display them here have generously been donated to the Limestone Provenance Project by the institutions that hold the objects. Please adhere to the spirit of that generosity by using the pictures only for identification and research, not for publication elsewhere.
Other Examples:
To view a special web feature on the application of Neutron Activation Analysis to medieval French sculpture, go to http://www.metmuseum.org/special/set_in_stone/index.asp
