Flattery for Faience
Imitating ancient materials reveals lost manufacturing secrets
While students swarmed the halls at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology one Friday late last November, a dozen or so outsiders crowded into a small glass shop in the basement of Building 4. They were recapitulating the first steps of an ancient art. Standing around a workbench, their hands dusty and gray, the group listened to Carolyn Riccardelli, who gingerly patted at a pasty mixture that had the consistency of wet toothpaste.
Riccardelli, a conservator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, was showing the group of materials scientists, archaeologists, and conservators how to formulate and mold an ancient Egyptian material known as faience. It’s a type of ceramic with a quartz core and glazed surface. A well-known example is an 8-inch-long, bright-blue hippopotamus at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.