By William Gerhardinger ’24
The icons of holy figures in the Blick-Harris Study Collection provide students with many research opportunities from provenance research to iconographic and material studies. My task is rewarding both as an investigation in itself and a foundation on which future studies can rest. I reveal evidence of repainting on the icons through the use of ultraviolet (UV) light and Adobe Photoshop.
Under UV light, paint added more recently to the icons—and hence not clouded by varnish and time—reflects back a stronger, darker purple than the original paint. I record this repainting by creating an image of the icon in Photoshop and highlighting the repainted areas. This involves digitally superimposing UV photographs over a photo of the icon in normal lighting.
This is a process that I have learned through other museums and researchers as well as personal experimentation. As a history major and art history minor, I have always been drawn to material history and trying to listen to what objects from the past can tell us. This work expands my understanding of the ways objects can speak to us. The repainting I have uncovered expresses the prolonged use and care for these icons by their past caretakers: a thin vertical ribbon of repainting reveals the icon cracked in half at one point; many delicate retouches around a saint’s face suggest it was repeatedly touched by worshippers.
I have friends who research these icons in other ways—translating the Greek or Russian inscriptions, or tracing how they found their way to Kenyon college—and it is always rewarding when my work can benefit their study. This is the larger goal of the project, to provide another resource for students interested in these icons. On a personal level, this work has helped me cultivate an interest in museum studies and restoration, which I hope to pursue beyond Kenyon.
William Gerhardinger ’24 is a History major with a concentration in the History of Science and Technology; he is also a double minor in Classics and Art History.