| News |
| Cultural Heritage Conservation Events |
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A project based on the common efforts of e-conservationline and Prorestauro teams was recently completed: an Interactive Calendar of Events dedicated to Conservation of Cultural Heritage. What does this new calendar bring? It was designed not only to update you with the current and forthcoming conservation events, but also to be used as a tool for conservators and other professionals involved in Cultural Heritage activities.
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| I Heritage Conference, Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa 14-15 February 2008, Lisbon, Portugal |
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| Organiser: Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa |
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Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa (SCML) promoted last 14th and 15th of February the first Conference of Heritage dedicated to the subject of “To rehabilitate, to profit”. The conference took place at the Cultural Center of Belém (CCB), in Lisbon. This event brought together several Portuguese specialists from areas like Architecture, Urbanism and Heritage in order to discuss practices of conservation and heritage profiting.
SCML is a Portuguese charity institution with over 500 years old. For centuries it controlled and managed hospitals and offered assistance to the poor and in 1783 the queen granted it the control of the national lottery as main funding source. |
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| Interview |
| John Asmus, from Lasers to Art Conservation |
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John Asmus is one of the world’s leading conservation scientists, acknowledged and often referred to as the grandfather of laser art conservation. He made history through his innovations which contributed massively to the advancement of technology applied to art conservation. Among his outstanding professional achievements in conservation over the past years can be recalled significant works of art as the Mona Lisa and the Emperor Qin’s terracotta army.
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| Articles |
| by Gian Luigi Nicola, Marco Nicola and Alessandro Nicola | |
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In Italy, and particularly in the collection held by the Egyptian Museum of Turin, there are many archaeological findings representing a challenge, in terms of conservation. Most of them were unearthed during the archaeological excavation campaigns carried out in Egypt during the XIXth and XXth century whilst some of them are donations received from private collections formerly belonging to wealthy personality and noblemen of the XIXth century, when it was fashionable to own Egyptian artefacts or even mummies. In many cases these collectors or their heirs donated such items to the museums for patronage or when they were no longer willing to possess them.
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| Material Studies and Characterisation |
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| Materials Used in the Chinese Textiles from the National Museum of Art of Romania by Ileana Cretu and Mihai I. A. Lupu |
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This paper presents concisely the results of the microchemical analyses made on Chinese embroideries and costumes, dated 18th–19th century, from the collections of the National Museum of Art of Romania, conserved in the last 40 years. Chinese textiles,
historically well known, raise many problems due to the materials they
are made of: very fine dyed or undyed silk, adhesive of unknown nature, paper metallic threads of different qualities, a different way of weaving and pigments used for decoration of tissues.
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These kind of items were sometimes decorated with pigments used without a protective coating.
This caused important damages: the decorations depicted with blue, brown or violet pigments were lost together with the tissue. |
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