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November 29 2011
The Greatest Threats to da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”: Milan’s Dirty Air & Visitors’ Oily Skin
Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” has survived since the late 1400s on a wall in the Santa Maria delle Grazie Church in Milan, weathering centuries of change and intrigue, such as a World War II bombing. Worried about soiling from air pollution in the city, one of Western Europe’s most heavily polluted, curators installed a ventilation and filtration system to protect it in 2009. The system worked well at reducing levels of fine and coarse particulate matter within the church (according to a new study), which should save the painting from worst effects of air pollution.But a significant threat remains: fatty lipids and organic compounds, such as those emitted from the skin of the 1,000 people that visit the painting each day.
Researchers found elevated levels of lipids and organic compounds (including squalane) inside the chapel, compared to outside. These compounds can combine with soot and stick to and soil the painting, says University of Southern California researcher Nancy Daher. These organic compounds come from visitor’s skin, fire retardants, cleaners, and even wax used in earlier restorations of the painting itself. The researchers recommend finding a way to reduce airborne levels of these chemicals, ...
July 15 2010
Mona Lisa and Mayan Blue: Art History via X-Rays
Researchers have decided to get personal with Mona Lisa–by irradiating her face. In a study recently published in Angewandte Chemie, researchers trucked around the Louvre to look at nine faces painted by Leonardo Da Vinci with a portable X-ray machine.
Their particular technique, as reported by the BBC, is called X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and is a way to uncover the layers of paint without damaging the paintings. By looking at this layering, they learned more about Da Vinci’s brush strokes and a technique called sfumato, which he used to hide transitions between dark and light areas and to create realistic shading.
The Da Vinci researchers aren’t the only X-ray art historians. Another recently published study looked at “Mayan blue”–a long lasting pigment made by the civilization that lived in Central American from 2500 BC to the 1600s.
Archeologists were impressed with Mayan blue’s resistance to fading, given that most of the other colors used in Mayan artworks lost their vividness long ago. As reported by Technology Review, Catherine Dejoie at the Néel Institute in Grenoble used X-ray diffraction and also examined the blue samples’ weight changes during heating (called thermogravimetric analysis) to uncover the pigment’s secret.
The researchers knew that the Mayans made their blue by heating the pigment with palygorskite (a type of clay); their analysis showed that this heating allowed the pigment to enter tiny channels in the clay which are sealed after the mixture cools, protecting and keeping the pigment true blue for centuries.
Check out DISCOVER’s new Web TV show Joe Genius, in which things get blown up for the sake of science.
Related content:
Discoblog: Guggenheim & YouTube: The High Art/Low Art Mashup Is Complete
Discoblog: Astronomers Identify the Mystery Meteor That Inspired Walt Whitman
Discoblog: Did Michelangelo Hide a Brain Drawing in a Sistine Chapel Fresco?
Discoblog: Super-Size Me, Jesus: Last Suppers in Paintings Have Gotten Bigger
Image: Wikimedia
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