Lisa Pincus

Visiting assistant professor of art history and visual studies

Lisa Pincus is an expert in seventeenth-century Dutch art and a visiting assistant professor of art history and visual studies at Cornell University. She says technology can provide important insights into art, but truly understanding meaning can prove more elusive.

Pincus says:

“Getting under the skin of a painting via x-ray fluorescence may reveal several aspects hidden from unaided sight, such as changes in degraded pigments, previously overpainted compositions, and the chronology of a composition. Such discoveries give a boost both to materials science research and to a technical understanding of painting, and sometimes to questions of authorship.

“New technologies may well reveal new data, but these require analysis and interpretation to become useful and insightful knowledge about practices, markets, trade networks, historical significance. There are limits to science; a data-set alone can’t elucidate the meaning of a painting. For that to occur, we need other cultural practices to describe the kind of meaning that lodges in the eye.”