News

MAGICA at the American Chemical  Society Meeting

Our PI Márcia Vilarigues, and Team Member Vanessa Otero, will respectively present the works entitled "Hand-painted magic lantern glass slides: the influence of the light source and materials on the projected images" and "Winsor & Newton's 19th-century manufacturing processes: How science unveils the artists' colorman choices". 

These works will be presented at the Science in Support of Technical Art History Symposium of the Crossroads of Chemistry, American Chemical Society Spring 2023 Metting. This Conference will be held on 26-30 March 2023 at the Indiana Convention Center, Indianapolis.

Registration is open, and you can attend in person or virtually.

Posted on 25 January 2023; Reposted on 26 March 2023

The Magic Lantern was the first optical instrument for the projection of moving images allied with sounds and music, used worldwide.
MAGICA is the first systematic and comprehensive study on the relation between the tangible and intangible facets of the art of painting magic lantern glass slides and its use at science academies and entertainment places in Portugal.

This project emerged from a set of repositories of magic lanterns' images, preserved in several Portuguese collections, and aims to develop preservation methods for those images and try to understand how they relate to academic and cultural life (with a special focus on performing arts) of the country during the 19th century.

With an interdisciplinary team of conservation scientists, musicologists, conservators, curators, media archaeologists, theatrologists and artists, the MAGICA project will impact on the preservation, interpretation, rehabilitation and valorisation of this precious heritage as well as other associated documents such as theatrical texts, scores and iconographic records.