Mechanical Analysis of Restoration Protocols Using Digital Image Correlation: Textile and Paintings

Full Lecture Title — Mechanical Analysis of Restoration Protocols Using Digital Image Correlation: Application to Textile and Paintings

Presenters:
Joséphine Delengaigne: Textile Conservator and graduate of the Institut National du Patrimoine
Marie-Laure Gascon: Senior Lecturer affiliated with the Laboratoire de Mécanique des Contacts et des Structures, National Institute of Applied Sciences of Lyon and the French National Centre for Scientific Research

Strip lining intervention on the Deploration of Christ, a 16th-century painting, or mesh consolidation on a cyclist’s jersey has a common point: the modification of the mechanical state of the object after the conservation process. How to evaluate the consequence of these interventions on the mechanical equilibrium of the cultural heritage objects? Which restoration technique will modify as little as possible the mechanical behavior of the object? To answer these questions Digital Image Correlation (DIC) has been used to address conservation issues.
Joséphine Delengaigne was in charge - for her final dissertation at the Institut National du Patrimoine - of studying and restoring a cyclist's jersey worn during the 1935 Tour de France by cyclist Julien Moineau, which is kept at the Musée National du Sport in Nice. Made from wool jersey, the jersey's mechanical stability was a major problem. An infestation of keratophagous insects in 2020 had caused a large number of lacunas. In order to select the best restoration protocol, we carried out an analysis of the mechanical behavior of mesh consolidation techniques using DIC. Indeed, the consolidation of knitted fabrics has never been approached from a mechanical point of view. The comparison of strain maps led us to select the “best” restoration technique among four that were possible, based on a mechanical point of view.
Marie-Laure Gascon - also for her final dissertation - studied and restored a work depicting the Deploration of Christ, a 16th-century painting on canvas in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille. It is an early copy of a work by Bartolomeo Suardi, known as Bramantino, held at the National Art Museum of Romania in Bucharest. As part of the restoration treatments, it was decided to remove the canvas from the stretcher frame. Re-attaching the work on the stretcher frame therefore required the use of strip-lining. Thus, different strip-lining textiles usually used for stretching were compared using DIC. The experimental setup consists of a canvas on which these different textiles were installed and stretched.
So, DIC has demonstrated its use for the conservation process providing answers relatively easy to understand.

This presentation was part of the Mechanical Insights: Shaping the Future of Museum Collection Symposium. View details and the full symposium program here: https://www.getty.edu/projects/mechan...

Part of Getty Conservation Institute’s Managing Collection Environment Initiative: https://www.getty.edu/projects/managi...