![]() It includes online exhibits, StreetView tours of modern archaeological sites, a Google Earth Voyager trip following in the footsteps of Alfred Maudslay, a Google Expedition from the British Museum to the site of Quiriguá, Guatemala, some behind-the-scenes videos, and scanned glass plate negatives, field notebooks and most of the 3D models of the Maudslay casts. Exploring the Maya World: from ancient art to digital heritage is an attempt to bring a rarely seen collection out of the British Museum stores to the world using new technology. The British Museum and Google Arts & Culture have collaborated on a large scale project to digitise the entirety of the Maudslay collection and create a freely accessible repository of Maya culture, past and present. It was the unexpected magnificence of the monuments which that day came into view that led me to devote so many years to securing copies of them, which, preserved in the museums of Europe and America, are likely to survive the originals. Maudslay had the foresight that this might happen and now we're benefiting from his legacy. Since being first recorded by Maudslay in the 1880s and 1890s, the monuments at many of these ancient Maya sites have eroded and partially disappeared. Through the work of Maudslay and his collaborators, nearly 500 plaster casts of ancient Maya monuments and inscriptions were made – originally at the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) and then transferred to the British Museum in the early 20th century. On his death he left more than 800 glass plate negatives to the British Museum, as well as some of his field notebooks and publication drafts. Maudslay visited and explored 13 ancient Maya sites in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras between 18, often living at the sites for several months. ![]() The plaster casts of the Palenque hieroglyphic stairway, for example, were made from these paper moulds. His Guatemalan companion Gorgonio López became an expert in making these at the ancient sites and, luckily, the Museum retains a few of them. ![]() ![]() In 1882, Maudslay learned about papier-mâché, a much cheaper and lighter way to create paper moulds of low-relief carvings. Hundreds of plaster moulds of monuments and inscriptions were created and sent back to England, where Giuntini made the plaster casts that are in the British Museum stores today. To create detailed copies of the Maya hieroglyphic texts that so fascinated him, he took around four tons (the equivalent in weight to roughly two cars) of plaster of Paris (a quick-setting plaster) to Quiriguá and Copán in 18, together with a master modeler, or formatore, called Lorenzo Giuntini. He set up a dark room during his fieldwork, developing the negatives to check lighting and exposure. Compared to the earlier wet-plate photography, this allowed him a more flexible approach, not needing to prepare the glass plate negatives with a wet chemical solution every time he wanted to take a picture. Maudslay was an avid and gifted photographer, using new dry-plate techniques.
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