My key roles were to devise the project and now to lead the team, as well as to undertake my own work on it. After training as an architectural and art-historian, I learned the benefits of collaboration with sculpture conservators at the V&A such as Carol Galvin and John Larson. Later, I worked with John at the Conservation Centre in Liverpool (and learned about 3-D scanning and laser ablation of sculpture, in the 1990s). I have enjoyed collaborating with artists such as Richard Deacon, and with historians such as Steve Gunn and Mark Ormrod, and with Museum Curators such as the late John Hardacre. Working alongside continental scholars such as the late Axel Bolvig (Copenhagen), and with Cinzia Sicca (Pisa) and Martha Ioannidou (Thessaloniki) also led to collaboration on the EU-funded Tuning project. Some of these collaborations have generated life-long friendships.
The recent 3D Scanning conference at St Catharine’s College Cambridge in connection with this project was the fourth conference I have organised: this one was made the easiest of all by the help of my PhD students Conny Bailey and Rebecca Constabel!
I have always been interested in scientific analysis of sculpture. Peter Scott’s Reflex Plotter in the 1980s was used to compare busts of Henry VII by Pietro Torrigiano. The current project uses twenty-first century technology in innovative ways to scan and virtually dismantle sculpted objects.
Some examples of earlier work relevant to this project include:
P. Lindley and C. Galvin, ‘Pietro Torrigiano’s portrait bust of King Henry VII’ in Burlington Magazine, December 1988 (reprinted in P. Lindley, Gothic to Renaissance, Stamford 1995 ISBN 1-871615-76-3)
P. Lindley (ed), Sculpture Conservation: Preservation or Interference? Aldershot 1997 ISBN 1-85928-254-7
R. Deacon & P. Lindley, Image and Idol: Medieval Sculpture, London 2001 ISBN 1-781854374004
P. Lindley (ed), Making Medieval Art, Donington 2003, ISBN 1-900289-59-8
P. Lindley, Tomb Destruction & Scholarship, Donington 2007 ISBN 978-1900289-870
Articles which have been generated by the current project so far include:
1. The artistic practice, protracted publication, and posthumous completion of Charles Alfred Stothard’s Monumental Effigies of Great Britain, Antiquaries Journal, 92 (2012) 385-426.
2. ‘Pickpurse’ Purgatory, the Dissolution of the Chantries and the Suppression of Intercession for the Dead, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 164 (2011), 277-304.
Email: pgl1@le.ac.uk
Link to Phillip’s homepage here
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