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Venus Gets a Once over by Airport X Rays


capt.07f515938aac4c5c85b3648a922bc78b.x_raying_venus_garf101.jpgATLANTA – Conservators trying to restore a 1,900-year-old statue of Venus have put their heads together with airline maintenance inspectors who usually scrutinize welds and repairs in jet engines for any cracks.

Officials at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University this summer bought the Roman marble statue and its head, which had broken off sometime in the past 170 years.

On Thursday, they enlisted the help of Delta Air Lines inspectors at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, who took X-rays of the statue and the head to try to determine where the statue has been broken before and how old repairs are holding up.

Conservators will look for rusting metal pins that might have been inserted to fix cracks. Once they establish the condition of those repairs, which could date from antiquity to as recently as 200 years ago, they will know how best to put the 4-foot-6-inch statue back together.

(via yahoo news)

This entry was posted on November 6, 2006, 04:44 and is filed under Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.