Trigueiro demosthenes biography

ix

Preface

The idea for a conference on re-restoration of ancient sculptures arose in discussions with Brigitte Bourgeois and Mette Moltesen during a meeting in Thessalonike in the spring of 2,000. Talking together about current projects in our various collections, we realized that conservators and curators internationally were facing many of the same problems when they undertook new treatments of previously restored pieces. More and more, museums were finding it necessary to re-conserve old collection pieces as the early adhesives failed and old fills and joins deteriorated and became unsightly with age. The lack of systematic documentation for reference of the various techniques used by the earlier restorers had become clear to all, and conservators had established neither guidelines nor any universally accepted approaches to the preservation of the telling details and information they uncovered in the process of disassembling the work of previous generations of artisans. At the same time as the conservators were coping with the problems presented by the actual objects, scholars sifting through archival materials in libraries across Europe and the United States were discovering previously unmined sources of information about the early sculptors,