Professor Bo Ossian Lindberg

BO OSSIAN LINDBERG is Professor Emeritus of Art History at Åbo Akademi University, Finland, as well as an artist: painter. He is an internationally recognized scholar of art, specialized in the pictorial world of the poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827), to whom Lindberg’s doctors’s thesis William Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job , published in 1973, was dedicated. Since the 1980’s he has focused his research on the materials and techniques of ancient art. He is today considered to be the foremost authority in this field in the Nordic countries with expertise in the painting techniques on wall and on panel of the Italian art during the middle Ages and the Renaissance. For many years, he was an Associate professor and lecturer at Lund University, where he has also given courses in materials and techniques of ancient art for students as well as a private courses in the same subject for painting restorers. He is often consulted by museums, restorers and artists working in ancient techniques on issues related to problems concerning the way of understanding and handling paintings belonging to ancient art. Among his important scholarly contributions are several Swedish translations of ancient texts on painting technique, i.e. prescriptions on how to make and to use artistical materials in painting, written by Theophilus Presbyter (12th c.), Heraclius, (12th c.) Cennino Cennini (15th c.), Giorgio Vasari (16th c.) and Theodore Turquet da Mayerne (17th c.). He has recently published a scientifically commented translation of Il libro dell’arte della pittura (the book about the art of painting), written by Cennino Cennini in Florens 1437, a collection of recipes and techniques of Italian Medieval and Renaissance painting on panel and wall (al secco and al fresco). This book is an important part of the foundation of the Academic studies of Art.