ANOTHER MASTERPIECE OF THE MANKIND RESTORED BY GREEN QUANTA SYSTEM LASERS
Florence April 25th, 2010
Quanta System announced today that its Thunder Art Lasers have been successfully and extensively used to solve and complete the cleaning restoration of the soft blue paintings which relate to the sails of the top of the Cappella Maggiore of the Santa Croce church in Florence.
The work consisted in removing a general patina of calcium oxalates which colour was yellow-brown, and the cleaning of some repainted layers, where artists had used an Artificial Oltremare (blue) or Prussian Blue which partially filled large lacks of azzurrite and partially overlapped with the azzurriti themselves.
The original paintings showed some areas characterized by a very bad conservation status, with parts which tended to detatch from the main substrate.
For this reasons, restorers could have never used water based methods. These would have caused the risk of a loss of the original materials, due to the contact with the Japanese paper.
One of the possibilities which has been also explored was to look for a pre-consolidating material, to then make cleaning attempts through tensioactive substances or solvents. However this has been reputed particularly difficult, due to the hardness of the oxalate layers and the weakness of the below painting thin films.
The intuition of Dr. Anna Brunetto, clara fama restorer, suggested the use of our green Q-Switched laser radiation (532 nm) which action allowed to remove oxalate layers and most of the layers added during the centuries, keeping and conserving the original azzurrite and the other patinas.
The chromatic result of this operation has been controlled through colorimetric measurements.
The work has been performed in cooperation with Dr. Maria Rosa Lanfranchi of the Opificio Pietre Dure in Florence.
