A digital mask could help speed up oil painting restoration

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A high-tech breakthrough could speed up the restoration of centuries-old paintings using a digital mask. Scientists say the method, tested on a 15th-century work, took hours instead of months, and leaves the original untouched.

The method, published in Nature on June 11, uses a digitally printed mask to repair damaged images. Researchers tested it on a 15th-century oil painting that had suffered heavy damage.

Instead of months of cleaning, analysis and touch-ups, this process took just three and a half hours.

It works by digitally reconstructing the missing parts of the painting. That digital image is then printed onto a color-accurate laminate. The printed mask is laid directly over the damaged artwork, restoring the image without altering the original.

“This is a multilayer film that is made of very thin polymer membranes that are bound with conservation-grade varnish, and this mask it is a color-accurate printed mask of just the regions that need to be restored in the painting and is otherwise transparent everywhere else,” explains Alex Kachkine, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who has led the study.

The process used more than 57,000 unique colors and covered over 66,000 square millimeters. Crucially, the mask is removable, so no permanent changes are made to the painting itself.

The method only works on smooth, varnished surfaces for now. But experts say it could help museums restore more works, especially those lower on the priority list. And it may be a step toward bridging the gap between digital tools and physical restoration.

And Kachkine says it will not replace traditional, human conservators.

“A conservator needs a huge amount of background knowledge, skill, and resources to preserve the work and ensure it’s maintained for future generations. This technique changes none of that,” he says.

“What it gives conservators is more tools, more precision, and more flexibility. It also enables them to work on more pieces than they were previously able to.”

This article and video were provided by The Associated Press.

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[Rendered animation showing the major stages of physically-applied digital restoration]

[Undated still showing rendering of the layers of the laminate mask]

Alex Kachkine (interview): “So the work itself has entailed basically constructing a digital facsimile of a painting that is restored and then deriving out what are the regions of damage that we need to cover up with the mask. That mask is then physically fabricated on a very thin, hair-thin plastic film that then goes onto the painting reversibly and restores the damages that are present.”

[The restored painting in the study, “Adoration after Martin Schongauer” by the Master of the Prado Adoration from the late 15th century]

Alex Kachkine (interview): “This is a multi-layer film that is made of very thin polymer membranes that are bound with conservation grade varnish and this mask it is a colour-accurate printed mask of just the regions that need to be restored in the painting and is otherwise transparent everywhere else. And the mask is both removable directly and it is solvable with conventional conservation grade solvents. So it is reversibly applied to a painting. It’s a much quicker process than a conventional manual restoration and it is both reversible and very predictable which is also not something that we’ve been able to do before.”

[Art restorers at work]

Alex Kachkine (interview): “So with manual restorations we tend to in paint often thousands of damages on paintings by hand and that requires a fair amount of colour matching skill and people are very subject to illusions. We don’t really do that well and we’re also not really precise for very small damages that might be present on a painting. We’re not necessarily going to be able to by hand restore all of them and for particularly damaged works that process can take months, years, and even decades. So being able to apply a digitally restored version of the painting to restore the work and do so in just a matter of hours, that’s really unheard of and has the potential to dramatically reduce the expenses required to restore paintings that might not otherwise have conservation budgets available for them.”

[Restorers at work]

Alex Kachkine (interview): “I’ve gotten this question a few times: will this replace conservators? Absolutely not. Conservators – most of their work as skilled artisans – is tied to the material aspects of a painting: analyzing its condition and dealing with structural conservation. Every painting has gone through various stages over the course of its existence. And often, for paintings like the one in the study, which are half a millennium old, they’ve gone through so many different stages of damage that a conservator has to have a huge amount of background knowledge, skill, and resources to preserve the work and ensure it’s maintained for future generations. This technique changes none of that. What it gives conservators is more tools, more precision and flexibility. It also enables them to work on more pieces than they were previously able to. There are a lot of damaged paintings out there. We are definitely not restoring all of them at present. Hopefully, this technique can help conservators address art that’s damaged – art they otherwise wouldn’t try restoring in the first place.”

[Restorers at work]

This script was provided by The Associated Press.

The related lesson for this video will be published next Wednesday.