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Henry Lie '76 waits at the basement delivery doors behind the Fogg Art Museum. Lie is director of Harvard's Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, and on this evening in late May 1995 he is expecting an industrial x-ray team. By now, visitors to the museum galleries overhead have gone, but a rental party carries on in an upstairs room. "Because of the radiation, security wants to clear the building before we begin," Lie offers. "It's just a safety procedure."

Lie will be x-raying several statues for the exhibition The Fire of Hephaistos: Large Classical Bronzes from North American Collections, on display at the Sackler Museum from April 20 through August 11. The first ever devoted to large-scale classical bronze statues, the exhibition is also the first to focus on the role of technology in the history of classical sculpture. As such, it brings the work of the conservator and the scientist, who generally toil behind the scenes, to the fore, and relegates the usual art historical issues of connoisseurship to a secondary role.

More than technique is at stake. The exhibition will shift our preconceptions about classical bronze statues from one long-held belief-that each work was made as a unique masterpiece-to a new paradigm: that production workshops in antiquity turned out multiple copies of works in bronze to meet market demand. The analogy, it seems, is less to Rembrandt than to Henry Ford.

Lie (pronounced `Lee') has already made x-ray photographs of most of the bronzes in the upcoming show. The statues he'll work on tonight are unusual. A thick smearing of lead across their inner surfaces has prevented the museum's own x-ray apparatus from revealing anything about their hidden structures. The nondestructive testing team coming tonight will bring an iridium-192 radioactive isotope source to cut through the lead fog.

Lie will use the radiographs to study "joins" in the statues. Ancient metalworkers typically cast small bronzes in one piece, but the size and complexity of large bronzes made casting them in several pieces more practical. As a result, separately cast arms, hands, heads, torsos, feet, and legs needed to be assembled. The point where these body parts connect is called the "join." Joins can be made in several ways at different stages of casting. A number in this exhibit are reinforced on the interior with a doughnut of lead. The radiographs will help Lie characterize the joining technique and distinguish ancient work from modern repairs.

The industrial x-ray team, consisting of three men in blue jeans, finally arrives. Their leader wears a Harley-Davidson T-shirt, tight, and carries a flat metal case that contains unexposed films. A second man holds a coiled wire cord on a large reel, while a third grips a yellow lunchbox. They are accustomed to making images of welds in the steam-bearing pipes of power plants. Classical bronze statuary is somewhat beyond the pale of their experience. Lie distributes radiation badges and leads the unlikely looking crew past the museum guards. Though Harvard's office of Environmental Health and Safety has thoroughly scrutinized the procedure, the guards' apprehension seems to increase with each assurance that the radiation will not reach them. Eventually they decide to relocate their security station to the next building.

Down a concrete corridor is the lab, where the museum's own x-ray machine-a yellow torpedo with red stripes-seems more menacing by far than the radioactive iridium source within the yellow lunchbox. One wonders, what kind of shielding can contain radiation that passes readily through lead? The answer lies in 40 pounds of depleted uranium; this is no ordinary little yellow lunchbox. While one man attaches an end of the wire reel (called a gamma ray projector control) to a collar on the near end of the lunchbox, the two other men help Lie place an unexposed 14-by-17-inch x-ray film beneath a prone statue of Artemis, Greek goddess of the hunt. Under the film they slip a lead sheet that will prevent the steel cart on which she lies from scattering radiation back up into the film. Finally, a second wire is run from the far end of the lunchbox to a position directly above the statue. Now the whole group backs out of the lab and into the hallway, paying out wire from the reel on the gamma ray projector control. All present are thankful for the six-foot-thick concrete walls that now separate them from the iridium source, or "contact pill."

With a source meter (which, like a Geiger counter, measures radiation) at his side, one man kneels beside the reel of wire and cranks furiously. The needle on the meter twitches upward as the contact pill leaves its uranium housing, pushed along by the crankwire as fast as human hands can crank it. Four minutes pass as the film is exposed, then the pill is drawn back in. "Harley," the leader, retrieves the film and heads back to his truck, where the windowless cargo area has been refitted as a darkroom. With the truck's rear gates closed, there is no rent in the blackness, and sound-sloshing developer, fixer, and water-is the only sensory input. Minutes pass. Then on clicks the safelight, and everything is bathed in red. The time is 7:40, and the first exposure has turned out well, revealing the modern nature of a repair to Artemis's arm. Four or five overlapping exposures will be necessary to capture a complete image of each statue, so when the night's work ends, Lie can scan each image into his computer. Eventually he will make a single composite image of every statue in the exhibit.

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