video: Restoration of 16th-century drawing reproducing a detail from the "Ascesa dei Beati" (Michelangelo Buonarroti) from Sistine Chapel, carried out by the paper restorer Antonio Mirabile. view more
Credit: PNAS
Researchers demonstrate the use of fluid-embedded hydrogels to safely remove adhesive tapes from paper artworks. Many ancient and contemporary artworks are marred by pressure-sensitive tapes, which are composed of an adhesive, such as rubber or silicone, layered atop a support, such as paper or fabric. Current methods to remove adhesive tapes from artworks rely on solvents, which can spread across and irreversibly disfigure the underlying artwork. To noninvasively remove adhesive tapes from paper artworks, Piero Baglioni and colleagues fashioned a hydrogel into which a nanostructured fluid was embedded. The fluid was composed of droplets of the organic solvents ethyl acetate, 1-pentanol, and propylene carbonate stabilized in water by the surfactant sodium dodecyl sulfate. Using the fluid-loaded hydrogel cut to match the size and shape of the adhesive tapes, the authors safely detached the tapes from two 20th-century drawings by the Portuguese-French abstractionist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and the American artist Helen Phillips Hayter. Similarly, applying the hydrogel to a fragment of rubber-on-cellulose tape on a 16th-century rendering of a scene of The Last Judgment by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel helped safely remove the tape. Hidden underneath the tape was the inscription "di mano di Michelangelo," which the authors believe to be a false attribution obscured with the tape by a collector. The authors also used the hydrogel to remove tape-induced discolorations on a ball-point-pen-and-tempera drawing by the 20th-century Italian artist Lucio Fontana; wet cleaning, by contrast, can erase pen strokes. According to the authors, confining the nanostructured fluid to the hydrogel enables rapid removal of adhesive tapes without lateral migration of solvents into artworks, and the hydrogel can be easily recharged for multiple applications.
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Article #18-01962: "Restoration of paper artworks with microemulsions confined in hydrogels for safe and efficient removal of adhesive tapes," by Nicole Bonelli, Costanza Montis, Antonio Mirabile, Debora Bert, Piero Baglioni.
MEDIA CONTACT: Piero Baglioni, University of Florence, ITALY; tel: +39 055-457-3033, +39 348-783-2750; e-mail: <baglioni@csgi.unifi.it>
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences