00:10
So, now that we've re-listened to what we just recorded, and now we both remembered.
Remembered my second question.
So, what was your question again?
My question is that how do you know the...
So, once the painter, you know, artist finishes her or his work,
so the artwork starts to deteriorate immediately in practice, right?
We need to do the conservation?
Yes, yes.
So, how do you know when you need to do the conservation,
you know, whether that's the artist's intention or it's the result of the deterioration?
Okay, so when we are doing conservation,
how do you know if some parts of artwork are intended to deteriorate
or if it's better to preserve the original condition?
Right, like the color seems odd.
Right, yeah, yeah.
So, traditional art, I guess, you know, the artists were...
It's sort of generally understood that we all think that it's best to return to its original condition
unless it's specifically documented by the artist that the part of the artwork is the deterioration,
which is more of a new concept.
I think there might be some contemporary artists who produce artwork with deterioration in mind.
I cannot think of any particular example as of now, but sort of more contemporary artists,
I think the whole point of the artwork, for instance, is to observe that process of deterioration
or to observe the process of change over time.
Right, right.
But generally speaking, things that we do conserve are things that is widely understood to be...
It's sort of agreed by many people that this should return to the original condition.
So, and this is where it gets a little tricky because it's not like anyone gets to say,
oh, I want this artwork to be conserved, right?
The decision making is done by many people,
03:02
and I don't know the full extent of who decides to conserve one artwork over the other.
A lot of people want to conserve, let's say, Leonardo da Vinci's work,
because we think he's important, we think his artwork is important,
and a lot of people are willing to put money towards that.
But every time we're putting money into da Vinci artwork,
we might be missing the opportunity to conserve other equally important artwork.
So there's a little bit of non-scientific discussion that happens
in terms of who gets priority and what, and how much, I guess.
So it's not just purely this artwork is in a dire condition and needs a lot of work.
It's not just that.
But oftentimes, that's the reason.
Some artworks are very easy to fall apart and easy to deteriorate.
And there's already a known amount of value,
whether it's monetary value for that artwork,
or if it's just sort of human cultural heritage value.
We all think that this particular artwork from this era,
from these sets of people are anthropologically important, for instance.
Then that's when we decide that, okay, the conservation of this,
let's say, murals or this architecture is very important,
and that's why we do it.
And it's just sort of our own decision.
It's not always clear if the artist wanted the artwork to be conserved.
But assuming that they all wanted it to look like when it was completed,
it is still a lot of research that happens.
How exactly did it look like?
Because when you're dealing with artworks from many centuries ago,
you have no photographs of what it looked like before.
And even if there was any photograph of it,
it's usually probably not good enough resolution or good enough quality
to really tell what it looked like in a very, very detailed way.
And that's why the scientific team, like what I do,
we try to understand and sort of do a detective job
of molecular or sort of material level detection.
06:02
How it might change over time, like estimation.
Yeah, there's a research area in our field where people look at
and also try to quantify the extent of fading of different inks,
different paints, how much light exposure causes it to fade in a visible way.
And there's also like even more sort of advanced study of that.
It's one thing for the fading to be noticeable by human eyes,
but fading really is a photochemical reaction,
a photochemical breakdown of the ink or the sort of pigment molecule
or the binding medium or the base material like paper or canvas itself.
So or frequently it's a combination of all of these materials
that are present in the artwork.
So it's a really complex photochemistry and it always sort of,
it takes a lot of time for it to be noticeable by human eyes.
By the time it's noticeable to us, the process has already gone,
like already happened to a pretty severe extent.
So there are researchers who are trying to catch these super early sign of fading
and quantify it and make sort of like flag the conservation community like,
hey, this...
From short term alteration, they're trying to predict long term.
Yeah, they're trying to systematically study how much light exposure
causes this much fading for various materials or the combination of materials.
So that's definitely a research area.
The damage is usually not...
Fading is one example of the damage.
It could be cracks. It could be a bunch of other things.
One of the more interesting things, which maybe I should talk about
in the論文紹介 episode one of these days,
which I would love to, is soap development.
So in like traditional Western paintings,
the stuff that are present on canvas are binding mediums,
which are what binds the pigments to the canvas.
So that's usually some sort of gooey material,
which is usually protein of some kind.
09:01
You know, people traditionally used egg whites or like oil to, you know,
pigment that binding medium.
And you grind, you know, your blue or red pigments or whatever
and mix them with these binding medium to paint on a surface.
People have found out that there are uber, uber slow,
like ultra slow scale photochemical reaction
between the pigment and the binding medium.
And all these like fatty acid layers that comes from the protein
of the binding medium reacts with metallic centers of some of these pigments
because these pigments are often metallic based,
like a cobalt blue or iron red, chrome yellow.
Like these are like basically inorganic pigments,
minerals that have metallic center and a bunch of, you know, R groups.
There are a bunch of CHs essentially,
carbons and hydrogens and all that kind of stuff around it.
So yeah, if they're close enough together for a long enough time
and with a little help of photons, they can react.
People just never thought that that's a thing because, you know,
it takes for the reaction to be visible,
the byproduct of the reaction to start surfacing that's chemically detectable.
It takes like multiple centuries because it happens,
the reaction rate is so slow.
Because if you think about it, these are super viscous paint.
You know, you think that paint when it's dry, it's solid, but it's not.
It's a very slow emulsion, right?
It's still like separable to mixtured items.
So these things take hundreds of years to react.
And we're only just starting to be able to detect some of these reaction product.
And yeah, trying to find, you know, ways to...
And then that could cause fading
or that could cause like surface integrity of the painting to alter.
And people, especially the works by University of Amsterdam and Rijksmuseum,
they have been extensively studying this because most of the collection in Rijksmuseum
is like 16th century Dutch paintings and things like that.
So it's been, you know, four or five hundred years since they have been first made.
And we're now seeing the effects of it.
So these are really fascinating research area.
And so sometimes you just don't know when it starts becoming a problem.
12:07
It can be so slow.
And certainly artists had no clue that this was going to happen.
So it is probably not their intention to get this fixed,
but we should still do that nonetheless.
So there are many things like that.
But you raise a good question because there's a lot of, as I said earlier,
non-scientific reasons, decision making process that happens
when an artwork gets decided to be conserved.
So it's not always up to us.
It's up to a lot of people.
Popularity?
Popularity, you know, sometimes this is the part I know a lot less about,
but I think like, you know, who's paying for this conservation, right?
And I think they must probably have some say in what gets conserved.
Like some people think it's more important to conserve Van Gogh
than Hokusai, for instance.
And if that's the case, then Hokusai doesn't get the priority.
And a lot of it, it kind of raises another question.
Like, you know, who decides what's worth conserving?
What is the value?
Yeah, who decides that this is worth conserving?
Who decides that this needs to be conserved for future generation?
And I think we need to be really careful about how and why we do it,
which is really difficult when there's private source money involved,
like donors, you know, because they get to decide,
but like, who is to say that they're making a good decision?
Right.
So lots of problems.
Yeah.
But that's sort of how we do it.
Yes.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening and find us on X at Eigo de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C.
See you next time.
