NIST researchers collaborated with the National Gallery of Art and other organizations to study "metal soaps" found in oil paintings that can cause the painting to degrade over time. They used a multiscale approach involving various spectroscopy techniques to identify metal soaps in a sample from an oil painting by French artist, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.
Credit: Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, adapted by A. Centrone/NIST
When you think of soaps, you may first picture the liquid foams or solid bars that wash away dirt, grime and bacteria. However, not all soaps are cleansers. In the art conservation world, metal carboxylates, also known as “metal soaps,” are undesirable: They form in ongoing chemical reactions that can damage the integrity of the paint and the appearance of paintings over time.
Though these compounds have long been found in oil paintings, surprisingly little is known about how they form and then proceed to damage these works of art. Now, researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have collaborated with the National Gallery of Art and other institutions to use novel infrared-light-based methods that identify the composition and distribution of these metal soaps at multiple levels of detail. Their findings may ultimately help art conservators better preserve oil paintings.
The researchers have published their findings in Analytical Chemistry.
Oil paintings don’t appear to change in front of the naked eye. However, once the paint dries, it’s not set in stone. Driven by environmental factors such as humidity and temperature, chemical reactions at the microscopic level constantly occur among the oils and pigments. Over time, whether a few years or centuri ..
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