Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
One of the most famous paintings of the Dutch Golden Age is Rembrandt van Rijn’s 1642 masterpiece. night watch. According to a recent paper published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, an interdisciplinary team of researchers conducted fresh and detailed analysis and found rare traces of a compound called lead formate in the painting. This work was part of Operation Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum. It is the largest interdisciplinary research and preservation project ever undertaken for Rembrandt’s famous painting and is dedicated to its long-term preservation.
“Operation Night Watch focuses on Rembrandt’s painting techniques, the state of the paintings and how best to preserve them for future generations,” said the director of science at the Rijksmuseum. Yes, says Katrien Keune, professor at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands). “Lead formate provides valuable new clues about the possible use of lead-based oil paints by Rembrandt, the potential effects of past conservation treatments on oil-based varnishes, and the complex chemistry of historical oil paintings. I will give it to you.”
Science, especially various X-ray imaging methods, has become a valuable tool for art conservationists. For example, in 2019, it reported how many oil paintings at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, had developed tiny, pin-sized blisters like pimples over decades. Did. Conservationists and scholars initially thought the scratches were grains of sand trapped in the paint. Chemists have concluded that the blisters are actually metal carboxylate soaps, the result of a chemical reaction between the metal ions in the lead and zinc pigments and the fatty acids in the binding medium used in the paint. begins to clump and form blisters and migrate through the coating.
Conservators have found similar deterioration in oil painting masterpieces from all periods, including works by Rembrandt. For example, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, a project is underway to identify the causes and mechanisms of metallic soap formation in traditional oil paintings. We are working with scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory to analyze samples using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and synchrotron-based X-ray methods.
In 2020, scientists will discover Edvard Munch’s scream (it showed startling signs of deterioration) and concluded that the damage was not the result of exposure to light, but of moisture. In March 2022, scientists will study Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Gypsy woman with mandolin (circa 1870). They used three complementary techniques to analyze paint samples under infrared to determine the composition of harmful metal carboxylate soaps formed in the top layer of the paint.
