Solving the Mystery of Ancient Ink Origins

Photo A fragment of a third-century B.C. receipt from ancient Egypt. Credit Ancient Ink Laboratory

In ancient times, scribes churned out documents — love poems, prayers, lawsuits — for clients who were illiterate or too busy to write. Although reams of the texts survive on papyrus, bark and parchment, the ingredients of the inks remain a mystery. Scientists, archaeologists, curators, historians and conservators are collaborating on testing these writings and crumbs of ancient pigments to unlock the ink recipes.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the conservator Yana van Dyke has been creating experimental inks from plant extracts, including oak galls, or swollen tissue on oak trees infested by wasps, to compare with those used on manuscripts. Hilary Becker, an assistant classics professor at the University of Mississippi who plans to join the faculty at Binghamton University in New York this f all, is completing a book titled "Commerce in Color," about the ancient Roman pigment trade.

The Ancient Ink Laboratory, a collaboration between Columbia University and New York University, is using nondestructive techniques like micro Raman spectroscopy, microscopy and infrared photography to scrutinize inks on documents. The lab is also studying fermentation residues from winemaking that may have gone into ancient ink mixtures and crusts found inside ancient inkwells at the University of Michigan's Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.

In poring over Roman texts, Ms. Becker has found references to indelible and invisible inks on the market, some of them highly valued, and complaints about adulterated ingredients and poor quality. In the fifth century, Roman law mandated that only emperors could write with prized purple ink made from charred seashells, for example. Anyone else who obtained this expensive dye would face the death penalty.

David Ratzan, the head librarian at N.Y.U.'s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, said that no one is certain how soot and other charred ingredients in black inks were made and harvested. Pliny the Elder mentions that the "best kind" of black pigment "is adulterated with the soot from furnaces and baths, which is used for writing."

All this new scholarship could be useful for experts authenticating manuscripts and for conservators trying to stabilize documents damaged by corrosive inks. Extracts in the formulas may also indicate where tree species once flourished and help identify the trade routes for ink products.

"It's all part of a puzzle," Ms. van Dyke said.

A Connecticut Idyll

From the 1880s to the 1910s, the painter J. Alden Weir vacationed with fellow intellectuals in a sleepy corner of eastern Connecticut. At his home there in Windham, he sketched meadows bordered by picturesquely sagging fences and encroaching railroad lines and textile mills; his visitors included John Singer Sargent and Childe Hassam. Anne E. Dawson, an art history professor at Eastern Connecticut State University, has spent seven years tracking down documents and artworks for "A Good Summer's Work: J. Alden Weir, Connecticut Impressionist," opening on Saturday at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Conn., and a book, "Rare Light: J. Alden Weir in Windham, Connecticut, 1882-1919," from Wesleyan University Press.

The Windham artists' colony has largely been forgotten, unlike some of its counterparts along the Connecticut coast and in the New York suburbs. Mr. Weir's other family home, in Wilton, Conn., is now the Weir Farm National Historic Site, and studio spaces there are still stocked with brushes, palettes and paints. In Windham, he worked in a converted shoe factory that has since been demolished; its weeded-over remains are not far from the Weir family's graves. His paintings of the area have often been mislabeled as scenes of the countryside around Wilton.

Ms. Dawson analyzed Mr. Weir's correspondence as well as family inventories. The artist sometimes adapted his natural surroundings in Windham to improve his compositions on canvas, shifting hill contours and adding hollyhocks and other plants. He called the technique "hollyhocking."

On May 20 and 21, Boyd Auctions in Portsmouth, N.H., will offer antiques passed down to Mr. Weir's descendants, including art supplies, paintings, letters and family photographs. Ms. Dawson said that she would document the material before it is dispersed.

Photo A glass facsimile of a sea creature known as Comatula mediterranea, made in Dresden, Germany, in 1885 by the glassmakers Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. Credit Corning Museum of Glass Sea Creatures in Glass

Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a father-and-son team of Bohemian-born glassmakers based in Dresden, Germany, were known for bending wisps of glass into detailed models of flowers and marine life. In the late 1800s they supplied displays for schools, museums and aquariums while also making prosthetic glass eyes and lab equipment for export. After a few decades on view, the botanical and zoological pieces were often considered outdated; countless items ended up in storerooms, their petals shattered and tentacles snapped.

In recent months experts have been restoring the Blaschkas' glass minutiae in preparation for "Fragile Legacy: The Marine Invertebrate Glass Models of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka," an exhibition opening on May 14 at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N. Y. It will explore the Blaschkas' methods of reinforcing models with wires and glue, the their shipping crates and the surviving glass creations worldwide. Videos will show conservators repairing the antiques, many of which belong to Cornell University.

The curator of the Cornell holdings, Drew Harvell, a marine biologist, researched the contemporary fates of the creatures that were immortalized in glass for her recent climate-change-related book, "A Sea of Glass: Searching for the Blaschkas' Fragile Legacy in an Ocean at Risk" (University of California Press). She collaborated with the filmmaker David O. Brown on a documentary about the subject, "Fragile Legacy," and the team's footage of marine life depicted by the Blaschkas will be screened at the Corning Museum.

An exhibition of the photo grapher Guido Mocafico's close-ups of Blaschka sculptures runs through May 24 at Hamiltons Gallery in London. Harvard's Blaschka collections are the subject of a book due this fall, "Sea Creatures in Glass: The Blaschka Marine Animals at Harvard" (Harvard Museums/Scala), and a renovated display that reopens there on May 21.

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