Two of Cezzane's paintings of card games
Pablo Piccaso's "The Guitarist"
Click on it to see the woman underneath
Conservation science can also be important for understanding the technical history of art. In 2011 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, scientists studied a series of paintings composed by Paul Cezanne. The paintings, depicting men playing cards, are very famous, but in 2011 little was known about how they were painted, and in what order. Scientists at the “Met” used infrared reflectography, a process where infrared radiation maps the layers of paint under the top layer. This allowed them to create pictures of what preliminary sketches and previous layers of paint looked like. The Metropolitan Museum of Art discovered that Cezanne most likely had trouble putting the men around the tables, because layers underneath the paintings showed mistakes including missing limbs! The Chicago Institute of Art used a similar process to examine Pablo Picasso's painting “The Old Guitarist” and found that Picasso had originally painted a woman in a chair, but then eventually decided on a guitarist.