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Introduction
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Head of an Angel, ca. 1250. Limestone, H. 9 5/8 in. (24.45 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Michel David-Weill Gift, 1990 (1990.132)
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The impact of time and history on works of art often leaves us with only bits and pieces to admire and study. The exhibition "Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture" (September 26, 2006–February 18, 2007) examines one particular type of fragment—the sculpted human head—from the Middle Ages. The exhibition, which includes heads from the third century A.D. through the early 1500s, considers such artistic and thematic issues as iconoclasm and the legacy of violence, sculpting identity and the evolving notions of the "portrait," the search for provenance for sculpture without context, head reliquaries as power objects, and Gothic Italy and the antique. Created from materials as diverse as marble, limestone, polychromed wood, silver, and silver gilt, the works represent mostly French, but also German, Italian, Byzantine, English, and other sculptural traditions. By examining the works in different ways, the exhibition draws together science and connoisseurship, archaeology and history.
Because historical events isolated these objects from their original settings, they became objects that could be collected, and objects whose lost histories curators and scholars would hope to recover. Frequently, sculptural heads have been separated from their original contexts for so long that researchers cannot determine with accuracy where the works were made. This feature focuses on neutron activation analysis, a scientific technique that has been used to analyze and document the chemical composition of stone from more than 2,100 sculptures, churches, and quarries to date. Neutron activation analysis, whose application to sculpture was pioneered by the Metropolitan Museum in the 1970s, defines the chemical "fingerprint" of the stone. By means of this methodology, researchers have recently determined that the mid-13th-century Head of an Angel that has been in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum since 1990 probably came either from the cathedral of Notre-Dame or another 13th-century Parisian church whose stones come from the same quarry.
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