The Dispersed Sculpture of Parthenay and the Contributions of Nuclear Science

Abstract

TWENTY-TWO limestone sculptures, thought to have once decorated the now-destroyed 12th-century church Notre-Dame-de-la-Couldre in Parthenay (Deux-Sèvres), are dispersed in numerous American and French museum collections. To assess their provenance, stylistic analysis and documentary evidence are here combined with compositional analysis of their stone by neutron activation. Comparison of the resulting compositional profiles with those of samples from the still-standing west façade produced matches for works in the Musée du Louvre, Glencairn Museum, William Hayes Fogg Museum, and a private collection. Samples from sculptures in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art differ in composition from each other and from those that match stone from the façade of Notre-Dame-de-la-Couldre. Still other works, such as those in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, returned varied results conflicting with other provenance information. This application of scientific techniques sheds new light on these sculptures, but just as importantly, this diverse group — by offering a range of archival, photographic, and restoration records — provides an excellent demonstration of the contributions, as well as limitations, of nuclear science to provenance study.