Associate Professor of Art History Mark Abbe has been awarded a Study in a Second Discipline Fellowship by the Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at UGA. This Program promotes interdisciplinary teaching and research among UGA academic units by providing tenured faculty an opportunity to extend the range of their knowledge through the study of disciplines outside their primary discipline. This Research Intensive Track Fellowship grants Abbe release time to develop new research combining the knowledge learned through Study in a Second Discipline with his primary discipline of Art History.

Abbe’s Second Discipline proposal, entitled “Ancient Color Under the Microscope,” seeks to uncover ancient craft practices in Greek and Roman painting through intimate, microscopic examination, and scientific characterization of the materials of artistic craftsmanship. Abbe argues that it was these very craft traditions (rather than the individual “artistic geniuses” emphasized in most histories) that were most central to the naturalistic and realistic figural painting that lay at the core of classical art.

At present scholarship on Greek and Roman painting is dominated by traditional approaches (e.g. style, formal composition, master artists). During the last decade, Abbe has become increasingly interested in grounding discussions of ancient painting in actual objects. His questions are progressively unanswerable using traditional approaches and the normal “toolkit”. He has become convinced that the future of ancient painting is under the microscope. At this intimate level of examination, ancient painting comes alive: from the deliberate grinding and preparation of pigments to their nuanced mixing, to their wetting with multiple binding media, and then their nuanced and masterful application by brushes, spatulas, and other tools.
The Study in a Second Discipline Program will allow Abbe to acquire and develop key analytical research skills to examine and scientifically characterize ancient pigments. He has developed this study-research program in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Georgia in collaboration with Associate Prof. Tina Salguero for the 2019-2020 academic year. This will involve focused coursework in the Department of Chemistry and extensive analytical work at the Georgia Electron Microscopy laboratory working on samples of ancient painting with both Prof. Salguero and Dr. E. Formo.

A specialist in Greek and Roman antiquity, Make Abbe approaches works of art as expressions of culture that are best explained by situating them within their historical, social, and philosophical contexts. In addition to extensive archaeological fieldwork in the Mediterranean (Italy, Greece, Turkey, Egypt), he has professional training in art conservation and the scientific investigation of works of art. He has received research fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, the American School of Classical Studies, and the American Research Institute in Turkey. Abbe’s research in Ancient Polychromy has been featured in The New Yorker article, The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture.

Mark Abbe received his MA in History of Art and Archaeology (2007) and PhD in Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology (2013) from New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, as well as an Advanced Certificate in the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (2007). He is the founder of the multidisciplinary Ancient Polychromy Network at the University of Georgia and is associated faculty in the Department of Classics. Abbe teaches a full complement of undergraduate and graduate courses on ancient art history at the Lamar Dodd School of Art.