Walters Art Museum

This is a particularly good one.

It's kept today in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

And it's actually a manuscript that was taken apart at some point, but we still have the illuminated pages, mostly together.

It was made by a man called William de Brils, and it's quite exceptional that for medieval artists we have a name connected to it.

The Cambridge scholar, Thomas Heath, who had translated all of Archimedes' known work into English in 1897, translated The Method in 1912 from Heiberg's text.

In the 1920s, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and hostilities broke out between Turkey and Greece, the palimpsest was removed from the Mattockian and spent much of the 20th century languishing in a Parisian basement until 1998, when it was sold to an anonymous American buyer who deposited it at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Although the book was in much worse condition than when Heiberg saw it, conservation work and the application of new technology has allowed modern scholars to read parts of the text that Heiberg could not decipher a century earlier.

Thus, the copies of Archimedes' treatises have had a very colorful history in order to survive down to the present day.

It soaked up water damage and received a fresh coat of forged devotional paintings, including an offensively angelic scene of Daniel in the lion's den, applied by an owner hoping to inflate its auction value.

When the text resurfaced at auction in 1998, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore led a major imaging project.

They used multispectral scanning and synchrotron X-ray fluorescence to trace the iron in the original ink straight through the fake paint and the medieval prayers.

The recovered text altered the known history of ancient science.

We are here with a very special guest today, Ashley Dimmick, who is currently the director of the Crossman Gallery and an art history lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

But she's here visiting us today to talk about the reinstallation work she did while she was the Wheeler Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in Islamic Art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

She was there from 2019 to 2022, and she is the co-curator of Across Asia, Arts of Asia and the Islamic World, the permanent galleries that just opened in April of 2023.

She's been visiting us here at the University of Virginia to talk about the reinstallation work, as well as the community input that she received when working on this reinstallation to make this collection more current, more relevant for Baltimore's local population.

And, you know, as part of the long history of museum stewardship and the gun had been in the collection since before it was a museum.

Right.

So the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore was founded by Henry Walters upon his death in 1931.

He gifted his properties and collection to the city of Baltimore for the benefit of the people of Baltimore.