Preservation: Centuries of archival materials and irreplaceable works by Rembrandt, Da Vinci, and Bach could be saved for the future, thanks to a new technique presented at the BA Festival yesterday.
The prototype treatment could slow the "enormous damage" caused to manuscripts by corrosive ink, according to experts from Slovenia.
Inks that were widely used from the middle ages to the twentieth century are now slowly corroding the paper they are written on, explained Dr Jana Kolar, from the National and University Library. This ultimately leads to the paper becoming so brittle that it can break, she said. The treatment uses anti-oxidants and alkalis to stabilise the degradation that is normally observed over time, she explained. The finding came from an unusual collaboration of art historians, chemists and physicists.
"We first needed to establish what the inks were really made of," said Dr Kolar. Art historians collected a large number of historical recipes, and scientists used modern analytic techniques to identify the various elements, she continued. It was found that the inks were acidic and contained either ferrous sulphate or copper sulphate.
In the same session, new analyses of the Book of Kells were presented by Dr John Fields from Trinity College Dublin. Laser technology has allowed many of the pigments in the intricate images to be identified, he said. The ancient document, believed to date from AD 800, is a Latin copy of the four Gospels. This is the first time it has been possible to identify the pigments used.