Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Wednesday January 25 2023, @05:46PM   Printer-friendly

Work is part of research and conservation project Operation Night Watch:

One of the most famous paintings from the Dutch Golden Age is Rembrandt van Rijn's 1642 masterpiece The Night Watch. An interdisciplinary team of researchers has conducted a fresh, in-depth analysis and found rare traces of a compound called lead formate in the painting, according to a recent paper published in the journal Angewandte Chemie. The work was part of the Rijksmuseum's Operation Night Watch, the largest multidisciplinary research and conservation project yet undertaken for Rembrandt's famous painting, devoted to its long-term preservation.

"In Operation Night Watch we focus on Rembrandt's painting technique, the condition of the painting, and how we can best preserve it for future generations," said Katrien Keune, head of science at Rijksmuseum and professor at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). "The lead formate gives us valuable new clues about the possible use of lead-based oil paint by Rembrandt and the potential impact of oil-based varnishes from past conservation treatments, and the complex chemistry of historic oil paintings."

Science has become a valuable tool for art conservationists, especially various X-ray imaging methods. For instance, in 2019, we reported on how many of the oil paintings at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, had been developing tiny, pin-sized blisters, almost like acne, for decades. Conservationists and scholars initially assumed the blemishes were grains of sand trapped in the paint. Chemists concluded that the blisters are actually metal carboxylate soaps, the result of a chemical reaction between metal ions in the lead and zinc pigments and fatty acids in the binding medium used in the paint. The soaps start to clump together to form the blisters and migrate through the paint film.

Conservators have found similar deterioration in oil-based masterpieces across all time periods, including in works by Rembrandt. For instance, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has an ongoing project to determine the causes and mechanisms of metal soap formations on traditional oil paintings; it is collaborating with scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory to analyze samples using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and synchrotron-based X-ray methods.

Journal Reference:
Victor Gonzalez, Ida Fazlic, Marine Cotte, et al., Lead(II) Formate in Rembrandt's Night Watch: Detection and Distribution from the Macro- to the Micro-scale, Angew Chem Int Edit, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202216478


Original Submission

This discussion was created by janrinok (52) for logged-in users only, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.