Vatican Museums

With the fifth issue of the interdisciplinary project "Knowing Conserving Sharing", the reports of recent restorations carried out by the Ethnological Materials Restoration Laboratory see the light of day. The restoration work concerns artworks preserved in the Ethnological Collection of the Vatican Museums and it is lead in a constant search for a balance between preservation and care for the millenary traditional expression of original cultures and the western approach to conservation.

The focus of this volume, available in Italian, is the conservation of Oriental lacquers: an experience that has also allowed the Laboratory to devote itself to the study of traditional techniques for the creation of objects, with the aim of defining the correct conservation practices for each individual artefact.
The artefacts examined here are a rare Thai dance crown of Burmese manufacture, a Chinese poly-lobed box in carved red lacquer, an ancient Chinese specimen of a Songzi Guanyin statuette, and a statue of Amida Nyorai from Japan.

Each report describes the results of the diagnostic analyses and document the phases of restoration; a rich iconographic apparatus and a brief bibliography accompany each one of them. The volume concludes with an appendix edited by the Cabinet of Scientific Research, in which materials and methods of investigation are illustrated.