Hi, my name is Antonia, and I am the Lehman Fellow in Objects Conservation at the Yale University Art Gallery. In this tour on conservation on display, I want to share with you some of the behind-the-scenes work that happens at the Gallery so that objects in our collection may be displayed, enjoyed, and learned from.

You are standing in the Ancient Art Gallery, at the end of which you’ll come face to face with a towering marble sculpture, a Roman portrait of a woman dated between the first century B.C.E. and the first century C.E.

The Gallery acquired the sculpture in 2007. An image on the label/screen shows the lady in a Parisian garden, where it accumulated biological growth, earning its nickname "the Green Lady." When it arrived at Yale, conservators, curators, and scientists worked together to examine the artifact and learn about its materials, methods, style, and history of care.

Direct your attention back to the statue in front of you. You’ll notice some differences as compared to the photo taken at acquisition, perhaps most obviously the color, the missing right arm, and the nose. Turn to the lady’s left hand; here we can see evidence of a previous restoration campaign using pieces of marble carved to match style and detail, and small iron pins originally have been used to attach the marble restorations in a technique commonly used to restore ancient sculptures the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Scientific investigation of the marble, more specifically isotope analysis, determined that the most likely source for the restoration marble was a mine in northern England, active between 1850 and 1910, which provides a possible date for the first restoration, whereas the original marble was a likely match with the Choradoki quarries on the Aegean island of Paros, active from the sixth century B.C.E. through to Roman times. Scholars also found epoxy putty on the sculpture, a material only available onward of 1940, used to fill in cracks and produce cruder reconstructions, such as on the left fingers in the image.

These repairs were disfiguring and unstable, and Yale conservators chose to remove as much of the modern material as possible. The sculpture was cleaned using steam to reduce the accumulated biological growth and dirt, and it was decided that the replacement right arm be removed. At this very moment in the treatment process, the public was invited to see the Green Lady, no longer so green, during the Gallery’s 2009 exhibition "Time Will Tell: Ethics and Choices in Conservation," where she was exhibited during the careful detachment of the replacement arm, supported by a crutch and arm brace.

Conservation requires balancing different priorities, including legibility, or what we might think of as a viewer’s ability to read and understand an object, aesthetics, artist’s intent, and historical accuracy. The arm was removed not because it was a restoration but because scholars determined that it was historically and stylistically inaccurate. In fact, the lady personifies "pudicitia," or modesty, a common theme in Roman portraiture. In this style, it was typical to have one hand draped over the woman’s middle section, and the other would have been bent at the elbow, with her hand raised and resting on her chin or veil. The replacement arm, which extended out, created a whole different effect. Perhaps we can infer, then, that at the time of the first restoration, the priority was to make the sculpture somewhat whole again. Modern-day conservation ethics guide us to intervene as little as possible, except where necessary, so that the object may tell its story. You’ll notice, that the iron pins from the first restoration campaign were visible, keeping a trace of the Green Lady’s history of restoration.

I often wander up to the Ancient Gallery to spend time with the Green Lady. Beyond her towering beauty, her story holds many lessons for an emerging conservator. One day, working at an off-site storage facility, I came across a marble arm stored with other objects from the collection not currently on view. In our files, I read that this is the arm that was once attached to the Green Lady, and I am reminded of the complex behind-the-scenes work that goes into getting objects on display.  I think of those who cared for her in the past, of our responsibility as her momentary caretakers, of her scars and phantom limbs, of her standing in this gallery for us to contemplate her, day after day.