CLEVELAND — The Cleveland Museum of Art’s new technology allows conservationists to uncover secrets inside ancient artifacts.
“We have a really rare opportunity to study the sculpture and to find out how it was originally made,” Cleveland Museum of Art Conservator Colleen Snyder said.
Snyder said the new scope works like a medical procedure, only for artifacts.
“We have this really state of the art piece of equipment called a Bore scope, and that is a camera, very tiny camera on the end of a long fiber optic cord,” Snyder said.
The scope, which is normally used to investigate plane parts, has a different use here.
“You can just see that there’s a lot of that dark material, those drips,” Snyder said, while using the scope. “Those are a previous restore’s materials that they were using adhesives to hold it together.”
This new scope now gives conservators information that has been trapped on the inside for centuries.
Beth Edelstein is the head of conservation and said the scope is already unlocking secrets of the past.
“So there’s an inscription here that runs along the interior of this soundboard and it’s written in a red piece and it’s a bit faded here, but we were able to get good video and good images of each of the Chinese letters in here.”
Edelstein said once they had the Chinese letters translated they were able to understand who made the instrument they were studying and when they made it.
