Dubbed “the Spanish Vasari” due to the 18th-century biography he wrote about the lives of his country’s artists, Antonio Palomino’s frescoes are taking on a new life of their own. His paintings that adorn the cupola of Santos Juanes Church in Valencia are being restored in an unusual fashion: enzymes from bacteria are being applied to clean them after centuries of dirt, war damage and a botched previous restoration. The technique is the product of a family’s collaboration over more than 16 years.
Pilar Bosch, a microbiologist, has teamed up with her mother, Pilar Roig, a conservator, to work on a €4 million project, funded by local foundations, to restore the paintings. The beginnings of the work date to 2008, when Bosch was writing her doctoral thesis and stumbled across Italian research suggesting that bacteria could be used in art restoration. Her mother was already struggling to clean Palomino’s frescos in the church, finding it particularly difficult to remove glue that had been used to pull the frescoes from the walls during restoration work in the 1960s.
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