Over the centuries, as wear and tear, natural aging produces patches with cracks, discoloration and peeling pigments, they can leave marks on oil paintings.
This effort is reserved for the most valuable work, as it can take parents years to repair damage, but a fresh approach promises to transform the process by restoring aging artwork in just a few hours.
This technique creates digital reconstructions of damaged paintings based on artificial intelligence and other computer tools. This is printed on a transparent polymer sheet carefully laid on top of the work.
To demonstrate the technique, Alex Kachin, a graduate researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, restored the work of damaged panels due to the master of Prado worship, a Dutch painter whose name was lost, as a painting from the late 15th century after Martin Schongauer.
The painting is very detailed, but visibly divided into four panels, covered in fine cracks and dotted with thousands of small patches of paint fallen.
“A lot of the damage is for small, complicated features,” Kucchikin said. “It's been deteriorating for centuries.”
Kachkine began by scanning the painting to determine the size, shape and position of the damaged area. This identified 5,612 separate sections that needed repairs.
After that, a digital mask was built in Adobe Photoshop. To restore the missing paint spots, the spots were added and the surrounding pigments were colored. Damage to the patterned areas was corrected by copying similar patterns from elsewhere in the painting. The missing face of a toddler was copied from another work by the same artist.
Once finished, the mask was printed on a polymer sheet and painted the paint and varnished it to prevent it from being overlaid in the painting.
Overall, 57,314 colors were used to fill damaged areas. The modifications are designed to improve the painting even if the painting is not completely aligned.
Seeing the results, Cachine was pleased. “We followed years of effort to make the method work,” he said. “There was a considerable relief that ultimately this method allowed us to reconstruct and sew the surviving parts of the painting.”
The approach described in nature can only be used in paintings with a smooth varnish that is sufficient to lie flat. The mask can be peeled or removed using conservator solvents and cannot leave traces on the original artwork.
Kachkine hopes this way allows galleries to restore and display scores of damaged paintings that are not deemed worthless enough to guarantee traditional restoration.
However, he acknowledges that there are ethical issues, such as whether films covering paintings are acceptable, whether they interfere with the viewing experience, and whether certain modifications such as copied features are appropriate.
In an accompanying article, Professor Hartmut Kutzke of the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo said that this approach provides a way to recover damaged paintings faster and cheaper than traditional techniques can.
“This method is most likely to be applied to relatively low-value paintings otherwise housed in closed rooms and may not be suitable for famous and valuable artwork,” he said. “But it could expand public access to the arts and bring damaged paintings from storage and in front of new audiences.”
