A bright winter sun streams into a room at the Baltimore Museum of Art, far removed from the public galleries. Her eyes dense with concentration, Angie Elliott picks up what looks like a long toothpick and winds a small clump of cotton around its point, an improvised Q-tip, and dips it into a bottle of ethanol. Bending over a table, Elliott uses the damp tool to gently swab the surface of an ornate 16th-century chamfron, a piece of steel armor with inlays of gold and silver, made to protect a horse's forehead and nose in battle.
The armor, in the museum's possession since 1945, has never been exhibited. It is the task of Elliott, as one of the BMA's two conservators of objects - as opposed to, say, paintings or drawings - to remove the accumulated corrosion and grime of the ages from the piece and restore it, as far as possible, to the glory of its prime, ready for public viewing with other Renaissance works later this year.
Elliott, 30, looks immeasurably content, her job of just two months the welcome culmination of an intense apprenticeship not only in the workshops of academia - Birmingham Southern College in her native Alabama, where she double-majored in sculpture and art history; and Buffalo State College in New York, where she received a master's degree in art conservation - but also in arduous archaeological excavations. It was in the search for remnants of the ancient Turkish city of Gordion, once capital of the Phrygian kingdom, that Elliott found her calling.
On her table at the BMA, a diverse set of objects awaits her attention alongside the horse's armor: a boxwood Madonna and Child, carved in Germany in the early 15th century; an unknown artist's ceramic plate from the 16th or 17th century; two contemporary masks, one from Mali and the second from Papua New Guinea and made of cane, palms, feathers and pigment; a flying angel holding a crown and scepter, its date and creator unknown; and a glass-and-bronze table lamp made by the French art nouveau glassmaker Emile Gall?.
We asked Elliott about her interest in conservation and her latest project.
You liked art as a kid?
