Book Heritage Lab - KU Leuven
VIEW - KU Leuven Core facility for Heritage Science and Digitisation Technologies
Charles Debériotstraat 26, 3000 Leuven
Contact: lieve.watteeuw@kuleuven.be
KU Leuven is an institution for research and education with international appeal. All programs at this University are based on the innovative research of its scientists and professors. KU Leuven ranks among the best 50 universities worldwide. KU Leuven is dedicated to education and research in nearly all fields. Its fifteen faculties offer education, while research activities are organized by the departments and research groups. These faculties and departments, in turn, are clustered into three groups: Humanities and Social Sciences, Science, Engineering and Technology (SET), and Biomedical Sciences. Each of these groups has a doctoral school for its doctoral training programs.
Faculty & Research Groups
Faculty of Theology & Religious Studies; Faculty of Arts
VIEW - KU Leuven Core facility for Heritage Science and Digitisation Technologies
VIEW - KU Leuven Core facility for Heritage Science and Digitisation Technologies
VIEW positions itself as a center of expertise where the interaction between heritage science, conservation science and digitization technologies is central, with a special focus on documentary heritage, from archeological artefacts to documents, manuscripts, prints and drawings linked with papyrus, paper and parchment.
Research Team
Prof. dr. Lieve Watteeuw is a conservator of graphic materials and art-historian. She is the scientific coordinator of the conservation and restoration of the Mechelen Enclosed Gardens and worked together with the team of 8 conservators (2014-2019). Within KU Leuven she is lecturing courses on material history, codicology and manuscript illumination. She is head of the Book Heritage Lab and of VIEW – KU Leuven.
Bruno Vandermeulen is responsible for the Imaging Lab – KU Leuven Libraries, one of the
partners of VIEW, home of high-end digitisation infrastructure and advanced imaging tools.
Dr. Hendrik Hameeuw is specialist in advanced imaging of heritage at the Digitisation Department of KU Leuven Libraries and is affiliated as a voluntary research fellow with the research unit Ancient History (KU Leuven)
Dr. Marc Proesmans is member of ESAT (Department of Electrical Engineering – ESAT; Processing Speech and Images (PSI), and is member of the development team of the KU Leuven Portable Light Dome ( Photometric Stereo).
Roosje Baele is art historian trained at KU Leuven, with special focus on the Middle Ages. She is member of the Book Heritage Lab – KU Leuven.
Hannah Iterbeke is Transhistoric Curator at the Museum Hof van Busleyden in Mechelen (Malines), the repository of the seven Mechelen Enclosed Gardens in focus during the extensive conservation project (2014-2019).
Research focus within ArtGarden
The team of KU Leuven studied extensively the Enclosed Gardens of Mechelen during the interdisciplinary conservation project (2014-2019) and is main partner in the ArtGarden Project. The sixteenth-century horti conclusi of the Mechelen Hospital sisters are extremely rare, not alone at a Belgian but even at a global level. They are of international significance as they provide evidence of devotion and spirituality in convent communities in the Southern Netherlands in the sixteenth century. They testify to a cultural identity closely linked with mystical traditions allowing us to enter a lost world very much part of the culture of the Southern Netherlands. The conservation of the complex Enclosed Gardens in Mechelen was the accelerator for introducing the research project on mixed media. The art historians and conservators of KU Leuven studied in particular the significance of the Gardens' complex content and visual language. Conservators and technical art historians explored their particular physical features. The knowledge gathered during the conservation was essential for pinpointing focused research objectives such of characterization and combination of different materials in one extremely small artistic artefact. The team of photographers used advances imaging techniques such as multispectral photometric stereo to monitor characteristics and changes during the five year conservation treatment.
Other medieval and early modern mix-media artefacts in scope during the ArtGarden project, such as the Miter of Jacques de Vitry, the crown coffin and the relic shrine book were studied by the VIEW in context of their historical, iconographical and material value. The team of KU Leuven investigated the historical materials and techniques in depth, aside of the written art technical sources and iconographical representations of particular elements.
Keywords historic mix-media conservation, medieval and renaissance art, iconography and technical art history, advanced imaging techniques, photometric stereo