 I'm going to talk today about something which I think is at the heart of what we do as scholars and increasingly in the modern world, and that's to say something about the historic and the present connections between art and science. I start with one of the images which of course you will all remember was part of our 300th anniversary exhibition. It's the making of the remaking of the face of Richard Brandon, the executioner of Charles I, the skull of whom resides in University College Hospital, using new scanning devices. Using these laser scans to manufacture the face in ways that we would have had to do with careful building up of physical raw materials in the past. But I start with that because there's something it seemed to me also visual and very evocative of what is now going on about this particular image in the way that we see the face coming together, that many of the technological ways we're now exploring the physical past is almost filming that we are now creating and using machinery which actually before our very eyes takes you stage by stage through reconstruction. That these things are not isolated in result anymore but actually very much joined together. In this society we represent many disciplines and in the past it's often been one of the shibboleths of the way we talk about things to say that there was a time when art and science were really not dividing in the way they seem to be today thanks to an education system which traditionally has done this and from the various interests have. If you look at recent edition of our journal, how you cut through it, whether you do it by chronology, by explication of the way in which people write about their material, whether it's a long or short article, whether we look across Britain or across the wider world, of course the thing that joins us all together as art historians, architectural historians, archaeologists, people working on artefacts of the past is that they will have something to say about the material that they're working on and I mean the physical material whether it's wood, glass, a wall on which something has been painted, whether it's the outside of a building, whether it's a canvas, a painting on wood, whether it's metal, iron or stone. It is that material substance which attracts us, which we feel we need to write about and qualify and very often the results of technological analysis are now incorporated into the way we write about these things whether it's in a subsection or actually physically in the body of an argument. We spend a lot of time at what I think of as the kind of refined or rarefied end of our material. It's history. We explore things like the iconography and the meaning of things and the meaning therefore for the society for which it was made. We look very, very carefully as antiquaries at its documentation, at the time of its making and usually as a way of establishing the origins and its use, the documentary history in the books, letters and manuscripts of the period and of course as antiquaries we're fascinated and quite rightly by issues of provenance where this object has been whose hands has it passed through and what documentation we have about that. One of the issues though is very much now I think the front end of exploration often when we come across these objects is what we might call the science end of things, how we can examine these materials and their physical structure with the modern technological advances that we have. These things can establish date, they can establish things about the circumstances of their making and often to something now about original context. How was the object constructed? Was it fixed or something originally? Was it contained within something whose hands indeed did it pass through? Are there any residues of things on the object that tell us something about the past that we didn't know before? And of course beginning with a skull here tells us a great deal about skull technology or the interest in the skull. Human bones were until maybe about three-quarters of a century ago something which yielded not very much because we were less interested in their physical makeup than we were in the discovery of the goods and artefacts that were around them in graves or in tomb structures. But now of course as this kind of thing demonstrates we are now fascinated by the reconstruction of the human form and all kinds of other things about diars and things of the past that we can tell from the remains of people themselves. I start with a very celebrated picture, our Holbein in the National Gallery of Jean de Dandfeel and Georges de Sel because of course when I mentioned that point at the beginning about art and science here's the archetypal object from the period of the Renaissance which tells us something of the range of skills and interests of this time would have had. On the top shelf you will see there instruments for telling the time for judging the distances between ourselves and celestial forms for reading things like climate and individual weather conditions. A series of objects used by people at the time which very much reflected their interests in scientific examination. On the lower tier of the Great Holbein there are things which are also scientific in the sense that they have something to say about the world a globe centered of course at the centre of it as a policy in France for which this picture was originally made and the musical and the lute reminding us of the arts of music. So the picture is divided up or and lower into the traditional division of quadrivium and trivium that the humanities and sciences at the time were equally divided. So looking at objects like this and seeing that interest from one side of what has become a divide in modern times is very interesting and as we look back through the past this is my art historical contribution here we can see that looking at those times when people specifically looked through let's call it and using the most of this metaphor the lens of science was very much about exploring the world with a scientific curiosity. Touch anything from 17th century Holland and this is obviously the case. Looking at the world with the new inventions of telescope, of lenses, of looking at things that and making us think about the world we live in in very very interesting and specific ways. The Vagstarten peep show box one of only three surviving in the world from this time and in the National Gallery moves the viewer to very specific points where you have to look through a peep hole reminding us that actually we make decisions about how we see the world by the way in which we're standing and what the eye chooses to focus on and abstract on the amount of things in front of it and of course the tiny Fabricius painting in the lower half of this slide also in the National Gallery patently by this strange sweeping street on the right hand side in his view of Delft a piece of art that was obviously meant to be seen in some kind of viewing box which corrected the perspective but makes us think too about the ways in which we put together the elements of the visual world. That interest in optics and particularly centred on the school of Delft is something that very much reflects that particular period and the interests of artists and their merchant clients at the time. Indeed, when we look at the paintings of Piddam they are inconceivable without the use of very specific geometric instruments with which he could measure churches and regulate the sight and the view that he's presenting to us. This is by no means the most spectacular of San Redam's church interiors but that sense that if you stepped into churches which he paints you could not possibly, with the naked eye, see all of this at once. This is an extended version by the use of instrumentation and of course what's so amazing and wonderful about things like this is that we can see a very direct correlation between the society which produced it and the physical object because there's something about the whitewash church the whitewash Protestant church which suggests something that could almost be mapped out on the surface as if it's done on a piece of graph paper because there's very, very little impediment to the geometry of the architect now in front of us. Leonardo Da Vinci worked for a court environment for much of his life after his early years working in Florence at the courts of Milan partly at the Papal Court, a brief visit to Venice and his studies of anatomy are very much determined by some of the great court commissions which he followed but also his own curiosity to understand and get inside, as it were, the human form to help his artistic compositions and that too with, and here's an example of that directly related to the emergence of his ideas for later on the swan was his thoughts on the allanatomy what makes it work, what goes on inside the female body in order to understand how he's going to paint via a series of drawings a reputation of something which is about sexual congress which is about generation using the observable world, using his skills of observation to generate ideas for his narrative content one of Leonardo's chief ideas about natural world of course was out of the disaw around him was a natural order of things so people have often compared his studies of exploding rocks or of winds and waves with the curls and features of the human head as that across the natural world there are things which have a logic and which parallel each other and which give him an understanding of the ways in which the world originated and that of course passed across to the way in which he handled landscape in some of his key pictures in the 18th century George Stubbs of course studied anatomy at York in the 1760s produced his anatomy of the horse and it's very interesting that what we see here is this skeletal form with its musculature and bone enabling him to understand how the horse moves and how it is active and what he said about this exercise in making this book of prints was this what you have here is all I meant to do it being as much as I thought necessary for the study of painting I looked very little into the internal parts of a horse my search here being only a matter of curiosity so a search for the external appearance through understanding what's going on just under the skin in order for him to paint those vivid scenes of horses in action and most especially pictures like this the great whistle jacket in the National Gallery which also is very much part of its age because what he does here is to isolate the activity of the horse against this neutral ground and I think we can very much see this as many commentators have suggested as part of that 10th century aspect of display this was a great picture painted amongst several bystubs for the markers of Rockingham which will be seen alongside or adjacent to galleries of sculpture that isolation of modern or classical sculpture against the neutral wall so that the form and the figure is studied is what he's doing here for the horse so absolutely about its time, about its purpose and using the cry of scientific examination to produce works of art and I wanted to end this section with Dice's Pegwell Bay in the Tate because it seems to me that it's an extraordinary picture in terms of its timing because he was painting this in 1815 and I don't need to remind this audience of that crucial date in the history of the evolution of science and the way in which Dice here represents and tries to encapsulate the difference between human time and geological time his wife and her sisters are searching amongst the rocks in the foreground whilst in the background are the chalk cliffs which date from whenever 1859 was perhaps to change a perception of when all this could first have come into being and in the sky representing as it were celestial time the representation you can just see it thanks to sharper photographs that we had 30 years ago and one of the early articles I read on this said that photographs almost didn't represent it but up there at the top Donati's Comet appearing and not then about to reappear I think for something like we're expecting it back in well from 1859 some 1200 years the critical reaction to this picture very much I think showed the way in which people saw it as a strange evocation of time and not a sunny landscape not a sunny beach scene of the kind that many Victorians were painted or that the great naturalist landscapes of the early 19th century have presented to us someone said it is as if a man had come to the ugly end of the world and felt it had to be told this quiet grey solitude of the moment making us think as I said about and celestial time picture and as I said also something painted in 1859 exhibited at the academy in 1860 very much to do with the kinds of things that are about to be revolutionised and changed with the publication of the origin of species how is the society involved explorations in the broadest aspect of the word science and its new technologies well one thing we do of course as has already been mentioned today is through our grants and grants in particular for research I'm here going as it were to the high end of the market detail from the Constantine and Justinian mosaic in Iosafia to make a point about these gold glass tessari that you see surrounding the figure there indeed on the clothes as well one of the things that the society has supported recently was the investigation by XRF X-ray fluorescence of some finds of gold glass tessari associated with the villa of Southwick in Sussex now we don't know for sure because the documentation isn't secure how these particular tessari arrived at the two museums from which they've come they're very small museums without much documentation of the past and Southwick is one of those places which traditionally is often said to be somewhere if there were ever gold tessari made in the late antique period this was one of the places they might have come from so the project here that we have supported is to examine the lead content of these fragments supposedly from a mosaic in Southwick to determine whether in fact they are Roman and the results of this will be published in the next edition of the journal so I'll leave you to wait expectantly for that so supporting research through our research grants is a way in which we try to make sure that research goes on that particular things which need technological support that usually can be costed very, very precisely as opposed to those projects where people are searching in archives many years in the future can often provide results very quickly that's one way in which society is and can be involved with such projects but there is of course a way in which we have traditionally been always interested in these things and I've put up again our illustration from our 2007 exhibition and also exhibited in America at Boston and Yale in 2011 to 12 the Hoxney Flint discovered in 1797 and the drawing made of it by Thomas Underwood which was very much a way it seemed to me when one looks at this of thinking of this object and drawing it very precisely in order to as it were turn it in the eye as if one were turning it in the hand and to make sure that we notice the particular faceting and particular aspects of this object famously the Hoxney Flint and the Discoverers around it at this time marked something of a new level of archaeological exploration because the various levels of deposit were very carefully identified and seemed to underpin work going on at that time to prove that these things were not meteorites or things that have fallen to earth but actually were created by human agency because of the human remains which were found at various levels of the archaeological exploration so work here and our careful conservation of this object in the years since and are exhibiting it is very much part of the society's history of this kind of exploration and the very careful way in which we record that past also from the exhibition of course which were then very recent we have to remind ourselves that things have moved on at that time of the exhibition in 2007 these laser scans were just few years old were already reaching a decade and things have moved on but our role in really since our foundation in the exploration of Stonehenge through archaeology there that we've sponsored through the work of our fellows up to that of very recent times of Geoff Wainwright and others who have taken the ideas about Stonehenge forward now of course we have new ways of looking at the site on the top left the laser scan of the taken from the air which of course is to show us things that were hitherto unseen and on the bottom right the laser scan of Stone 53 showing there in a way that you can't see with the naked eye the arrowheads and the graffiti or carvings the lettering on these which are barely discernible ways in which through scientific investigation we can record the past but also find new evidence from things we thought we knew rather well another way that we're striking ahead of course and again we've heard a little of this today is through the conservation of our picture collection and the ways in which the examination of our pictures has yielded new things that are adding to the fabric and the pattern that we're beginning to see across other projects taking place or things that have taken place in recent years in other institutions particularly to do with the art of the 15th and 16th centuries I'm thinking of the project Tate conducted by our fellow Richard Jones and current work at the National Trade Gallery looking hard at pictures using the techniques we have now to examine them obviously yield extraordinary results simply in the realms of doing macro photography here's a detail from the 1614 sometimes attributed to Marcus Girat's portrait of Lady Scudamore is a macro image of the flowers around the wreath which accompanies the portrait where simply by looking at that we get insights into the way in which the artist tackled this tackled and used his materials very very explicitly in the ways that it's very difficult otherwise to see and another portrait gallery picture a portrait of Nicholas Heath with the showing here of X-rays showing up the ways in which you can see underdrawing and the ways in which artists would have prepared their pictures for the final painting sometimes very rarely in England but in other countries we have working drawings which lead up to this point so we can see the difference between compositional ideas and the final working up of the painting in various ways in which what's happening beneath these things becomes increasingly apparent to us and that's the thing that going back to what I said at the beginning increasingly exciting because I was hearing just last week of instrumentation now that doesn't just record particular things and infrareds and X-rays will show you particularly different things about the underdrawing and the other layers of paint within a picture instrumentation now which will filmically show you the layers on after the other build up the picture before your very eyes as it penetrates the surface and records and takes you on a journey as it were right down to the way in the very beginnings of the making of the picture our pictures are contributing to this in sight here of our picture of Henry VII of the early 16th century where of course here we found that the infrared that was done on this picture as part of its conservation suggests that this picture was partly made by pouncing the surface that's to say by laying a cartoon on the wooden panel pricking the surface around the drawing and then making using the black charcoal dust to record image through those pinpricks a way of using the cartoon actually and also suggesting of course that cartoons may have been used for more than one version of these pictures and that's increasingly what we're finding with these portrait images that there may be one special one made to go on one particular foreign embassy or one particular journey that be made but then other copies were made for the internal as well as the external market and of course also within sight here the portraits of Edward IV and Richard III which came separately into Kerich's collection but thanks to dendrochronology on the wood we know were actually cut from the same tree this therefore suggests as we have always supposed that these were part of a set given the comparability of the lettering on them and the way they are physically made with their attached frames that these belong together though a warning here it's not always the case that things that are cut from the same tree all go to the same workshop the National Portrait Gallery is finding that there are things which physically must have gone to very very different workshops even across time where wood seems to have come from the same tree but I think surely in this case we can say these were painted together, got separated and miraculously ended up in the same collection and are with us together today pictures like this too and the way in which they come together and the way in which conservation enables us to look at the backs and examine the fixings and do macro photography of those things help us also to understand what we also have long supposed that many of these pictures may have been made for very specific localities we're used to thinking of sets of portraits as being things that are moved around often given frames and re-displayed in some of the rooms and especially the long galleries of later houses but many of these 15th and 16th century sets do seem increasingly to have been made for a very very fixed position and one day we may be able to do work other than the very adequate but basic conservation we've done so far on the remains of our set of Saxon Kings because we do need to discover with what I've always thought is a really extraordinary and precious set of remains there's no other set of remains a set of objects that were certainly all made for one particular place to be read alongside each other and one day we may well be able by looking at those very carefully to envisage a whole scheme of things along a wall and possibly for a very important and significant setting The mention of dendrochronology brings me to buildings and to my last section here where importantly as we've already focused on today to end up at Calmscott Manor I was privileged to be involved for all schemes of alongside archaeologists working on the history of great Tudor houses and one of the things that's come into focus much more across that century is and I'm talking here in very general terms because every site of course throws up very very different issues is that many houses where we thought by looking at the external fabric or looking at the intimations from the documentation that this all must have taken several generations to build or that the son of the original owner must have added on this wing or whatever Sometimes the dendrochronological analysis has revealed that in fact we have something we should always have suspected here of very very specific and very rapid building campaign That was certainly true of this house the vine in Hampshire where it was clear from the examination of this house and if you look in these at the red which runs through those four plans of Della ground floor first floor and the red other remains of the Tudor house to which 17th century and then later 19th century additions were made but from one end of the house to the other from the oak gallery there on the left on the upper floor to the chapel on the right hand side it does seem from the dendro analysis that the making of this house all took place within a very short space of time a space of time probably within about two years so William Sands building here is all of one build immediately after the time when he rose to the highest phase of his office holding at court and just after he was made a member of the peerage the same proved to be true of the later Tudor house of Parham which we had always thought incorporated medieval remains at one end we're here looking at the house from the eastern sorry the western side the kitchen area which had thicker walls and therefore was perhaps part of something from medieval times but again working through the roof spaces and looking at the timbers and getting a dating for them through the dendro seems to show that the house was largely completed in a very short space of time in the 1570s that doesn't mean to say that subsequent generations of the family and after it was sold out of the initial Parmer family didn't do a lot of the fitting out of these house in the last years of Elizabeth's reign and into the reign of James but again a rapid building project something which now through this kind of examination which we can now do taking a number of points of reference along the whole run of the house gives us a sense that this was something like other houses that was built in a very short space of time and gives us a sense of a better grip on what would have gone on here and so to Kelmscott you heard earlier about the ways in which we have challenges at Kelmscott first of all to make sure that we keep visitors numbers up that we Kelmscott really try and support itself through its activities it's doing well through the shop but we need to keep working at that and we need to make sure that we encourage more visitors and more financial support through our friend scheme which we're launching this year but also I would say given other times donations and requests there is work obviously still to be done on the physical fabric of the house to investigate a bit more about how it's put together and various phases of its construction particularly the differences between those two major early modern building phases of its life as was brought out in the book published six years ago on the house and its essential development it was in the early 1960s of course that the society took over Kelmscott in 1904 and it was during those years that the house was investigated and photographed but as Nicholas Cooper pointed out in his article in the book it wasn't the time when very much there was such pressure to shore the house up and to make sure it was fit for purpose again somewhere that could be open to the public and was waterproof not enough attention was paid perhaps at that time to doing some architectural and historical analysis of bringing documentation etc to bear on what was discovered in the restoration of the house at that period one of the extraordinary things of course that was discovered was the extraordinary Sirlian floor under the tapestry room this photograph of it in that part of the house the tapestry room of course in that part of the house the grandising of the house in the 1660s we call it a Sirlian floor because at one remove it's complicated as the Sirlio design but it is of course Sirlio who first suggests in printed form anyway and gives a plan of a scheme where you span a whole space by very short bits of timber job together one of the most spectacular examples of this is under the floor of the great chamber above the hall at Woolerton Hall it clearly was something that for a century more after the publication of Sirlio in the 1540s had an enormous influence across Europe when great spans or lengths of wood rather were not possibly available and that we think to that the builder of the house at this time must have known the civilian professor of geometry at Oxford who provided the details of the plates for Robert Plott's natural history of Oxfordshire in published in 1677 when where one such floor is thereby displayed in the top right hand corner so there is room at Calmscott when we've got time, energy commitment, when perhaps one day and here again a plug for fundraising one of the great challenges at Calmscott is those tapestries in the tapestry room some time are going to have to be conserved it will be very costly but when they come out when that room is itself conserved maybe even put back to as it was in Morris's day when Rosetti used it as a studio as two rooms this may be time again to look at this floor and find out more about it but of course it's wider than that and though we've already mentioned today the sense that there's lots to do at Calmscott in terms of the exploration not just of the of the house but of the landscape around it some of this was done some of this was adumbrated certainly in terms of the publication six years ago by the surveys that have been done of the flora around the house of the natural landscape of the mapping of that landscape more accurately than it had been done before with all the instrumentation then available by the time we get back to this we'll be able to do more this very much I think is the future of the site not simply perhaps to create only a visitor experience which needn't even penetrate the house though one must expect that many people from across the world are coming to see those William Morris remains inside but building up things like the friend scheme and encouraging people to come back to take people out into the landscape and giving them information about gardening landscape which enriches the visitor experience to do there which can use this seminal point of reference for us as the general secretary said not only in terms of William Morris his belief in conservation and all that that stood for but also in the wonderful setting of this house which tells us much I think about the landscape of our countryside so I want to end there but I will end by saying that this today has been a peroration for me very much trying to look at the ways in which scientific analysis close analysis of things sometimes with instrumentation sometimes with the human eye has enriched the experience of the artistic input into these great works of art that I've passed us through it's also I hope to explore some of those things and looked at things for the future next year I think we get down to a different kind of serious business because I'm reminded that next year amongst many I think debates will have here and elsewhere there is something to be said about the national picture given the sense of nationhood that we'll be exploring and indeed challenging and having to think about very much next year what the society has done to build up the national picture of our material past and what that identifies about both the country as a whole and the constituent part of Britain that I will want to give some attendance to in a year's time thank you very much