# @gettymuseum on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/CTN5pkFIJ1Q
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/34228978-gettymuseum-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/2fcb9022a2.jpg
- **Posted:** 2021-08-30T23:35:50.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Getty (@gettymuseum) — https://gondola.cc/gettymuseum

## Caption

Most cats can go to the vet. But what if your cat is made of bronze, and at least a hundred years old? For this month's #ConnectingCollections, we're exploring this small bronze cat through a scientific lens.
 
This statuette was bought by J. Paul Getty for his brand-new Getty Museum in 1955 from a dealer, Spink & Son, in London. Decades later, it remained off view, thought to be a modern imitation of these popular Egyptian artworks. But in 2019, a member of the antiquities curatorial team investigated a clue to its earlier history: a message from the late 19th century written on its base by a restorer and dealer: "Mounted By W.T. Ready, Nov 1892, 55 Rathbone Pl(ace), London W." The surface of the cat suggested that it might be worth a closer look—and that’s when we turned to conservators Jeffrey Maish and Almoatzbellah Elshahawi. 
 
Conservators at the Getty Villa use many kinds of scientific techniques to better understand how objects in the collection were made, repaired, and used over centuries and even millennia. Tackling the history of the bronze cat required multiple approaches: its metal alloy was analyzed metallographically and by using portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (pXRF), which confirmed that it was made of a highly leaded and corroded ancient bronze. Close inspection of the interior cavity revealed that what we believed to be preserved clay core material from casting the cat was still preserved in the cavity inside. Testing that core material using a process called thermoluminescence dating confirmed that it was fired between 1700 and 2700 years ago, consistent with an ancient manufacturing date. The 19th-century coating that first caught our eye turns out to be a mixture of beeswax, paraffin wax and an oil, applied so that the exterior surface appears uncharacteristically dark, fairly even, and shiny. 
 
Scientific testing and research collaboration have already allowed us to learn so much more about the many lives of this ancient cat, and we hope new discoveries still await us.

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## Tags

connectingcollections

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