For years, art restorers have used sponges and warm water to help bring masterpieces back to life, risking a lot of damage. Enter the bugs.
As Spanish microbiologist Pilar Bosch was casting around for a subject to investigate for her PhD in 2008, she stumbled across a paper suggesting that bacteria, her field, could be used in art restoration, her mother’s own area of expertise.
Pilar Bosch checks that no traces of live microorganisms remain after the bio-cleaning of the frescoes by the baroque artist Antonio Palomino in the Church of Santos Juanes in Valencia, Spain.She was finding it particularly difficult to remove glue that had been used to pull out the frescoes from the walls of the Church of Santos Juanes during restoration work in the 1960s.
So she did her PhD on that project. And more than a decade later, daughter and mother have joined forces on a €4million project, funded by local foundations, to use some of the techniques to restore the artworks in Valencia. Jose Luis Regidor, restorer and director of the project, Pilar Roig Picazo, lecturer in charge of the restoration and Pilar Bosch, microbiologist and researcher pose under the apse as their heritage team works overhead.The family team then mixes the bacteria with a natural algae-based gel and spread it on the paintings, then nails them back on the walls, still covered in glue.
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