Dialogues in Heritage Science: The destroyed Bamiyan Buddha statues - technology and color

February 24, 2015

Wednesday, March 4, 2015, 3:30 pm at the Sterling Memorial Library, Lecture Hall, Wall St Entrance, New Haven, CT

Dr. Catherina Blänsdorf

Catharina Blänsdorf studied conservation and restoration at the Bern University of the Arts. She completed her PhD on the “Conservation of the polychromy of the figures of the Terracotta Army of Qin Shihuang” in 2013 at the State Academy of fine arts Stuttgart and participated at the UNESCO/ICOMOS project for safeguarding the remains of the Buddha statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan.

When the Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed in 2001 they were famous since centuries as the world largest Buddha statues, but very little was known about the time and the technique in which they were made and how they originally looked like. Investigations on fragments of the statues conducted since 2007 in an interdisciplinary setting were able shed some more light on these questions. Their latest and ongoing results will be presented.