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The Context Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2004

Tracy C. Davis
Affiliation:
Northwestern University

Extract

In the minute investigation of old oil canvases, modern art restorers use a technique called rigatino to fill in where flecks of paint are damaged or missing. These fine hatch marks, made with thin paint, signal to later scholars and restorers what constitutes the restorer's work while fully maintaining the distinctiveness and integrity of the original artist's brush strokes. In other words, restorers have devised a straightforward method to indicate the exact positions of evidentiary lacunae and to mark the impositions of their own hand amidst the work of old masters. Unlike the superscripts of footnotes amidst a printed text, rigatino blends with the original picture, though upon close investigation it is always distinct.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2004 The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.

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Footnotes

Tracy C. Davis is Barber Professor of the Performing Arts at Northwestern University. Her books include Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture; George Bernard Shaw and the Socialist Theatre; and The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914. She is also coeditor of the collections Playwriting and Nineteenth-Century British Women (with Ellen Donkin), and Theatricality (with Thomas Postlewait), and General Editor of the Cambridge University Press series Theatre and Performance Theory.