Natural sciences at the service of art and cultural heritage: an interdisciplinary area in development and important challenges

Abstract

Our cultural heritage is a common asset that tells the story of our shared past, is part of our origin and identity and has wide social relevance. Our works of art and our heritage must be enjoyed, appreciated and preserved for future generations. To this end, a wide and varied group of professionals, including conservators, restorers, curators, bibliographers, historians, archivists, but also scientists, such as biologists, chemists, physicists and bioinformaticians, work side by side to preserve our cultural heritage. Working together in this wide range of disciplines included in the so-called 'heritage sciences' is the only plausible way to contribute to the sustainable preservation of our heritage. The great progress made in recent years in conservation and restoration work, but also in the natural sciences considered within heritage science, has provided powerful tools and strategies for analytical and experimental research into historical and cultural objects that open up new frontiers for their diagnosis, monitoring and protection. Here we highlight some of the advances and challenges faced by the natural sciences at the service of art.

New horizons on advanced nanoscale materials for Cultural Heritage conservation

“…[5][6][7][8][9][10] Over the past decades, these advantageous characteristics have driven the progressive employment of nanoscale systems even in Cultural Heritage (CH) preservation, [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] a strong interdisciplinary field where materials science merges with industry, social science and humanities. 22,23 Movable and immovable works of art, along with natural and urban landscapes, are crucial socioeconomic resources, provided that they are preserved against damage caused by environmental and anthropic factors. 24 Even though they involve different ethics, a comparison can be made between medicine and CH preservation, Among the systems adopted in Cultural Heritage preservation, gels are highly advantageous since they grant selective removal of unwanted layers from artistic surfaces.…”

Dynamics of interdisciplinarity: a microlevel analysis of communication and facilitation in a group model‐building workshop

“…Our engagement was part of the initial phase of the project “COMPLEX: The Degradation of Complex Modern Polymeric Objects in Heritage Collections: A System Dynamics Approach.” The project ran from 2017 to 2022. It was placed in the area of heritage science, an interdisciplinary research field applying primarily physical sciences to the study of cultural heritage, such as historic buildings and archaeological or museum objects (Kennedy, 2015; Piñar and Sterflinger, 2021). The COMPLEX project tried to better preserve plastic heritage objects, e.g.…”

Touching the (almost) untouchable: a minimally-invasive workflow for microbiological and biomolecular analyses of cultural heritage objects

“…Cultural heritage objects are often studied with an interdisciplinary approach covering history, archaeology, forensics, chemistry, materials science, molecular biology and microbiology (Mazzocchi, 2019;Piñar and Sterflinger, 2021;Flocco, 2021). In particular, the investigation of the biological materials composing or bound to heritage objects, such as proteins and the microbiome, has identified novel biomolecular historical markers (Teasdale et al, 2015;Rosenbloom, 2021) and re-kindled questions on the philosophy and ethics realm (Inkpen, 2019;Laplane et al, 2019.;Pálsidottir et al, 2019;Lange et al, 2022).…”