Seismic Vulnerability of Museums’ Collections: A Case-Study

Abstract

Conservation of art works is a strategic issue of scientific and seismic research. The safety monitoring of Museum's collections is fundamental for their conservation. However, a detailed assessment of the seismic safety of all the exhibited item is tough to achieve, due to the required amount of time and resources. In these years, therefore, the quick and simplified approaches for the seismic safety assessment have been object of a special attention for academics, scientists, and Museums' managers. In this work, a qualitative approach for the seismic assessment of Museum's collections based on forms filling is proposed. The proposed approach is aimed at understanding the safety of single items, staging and exhibition rooms. The analysis has been made on a case-study, i.e. the National Archaeological Museum "Gaio Cilnio Mecenate", placed in Arezzo. The Museum offers a large variety of collections, with items which differ from each other for material, dimensions, shapes and seismic vulnerability. Even the adopted staging presents a wide variety, including windows of various types, shelves and pedestals. The presented study provided the assessment of the seismic safety of the items exhibited in some of the Museum's rooms; moreover, it represents a simple and general method which could easily be applied to other Museums and exhibition buildings.

Vulnerability Assessment of Art Collections: The National Archaeological Museum “Gaio Cilnio Mecenate” in Arezzo (Italy)

“…They can be induced by natural events, such as earthquakes, or by human actions, such as traffic, shipment, concerts, or construction works [14,15]. The vulnerability of artworks to dynamic excitations largely varies depending on their type [4,[16][17][18], and their properties [19,20], such as material, shape, dimension, age, and state of conservation.…”

“…At the current time, therefore, the safety of art goods can be assessed only by (i) determining the amount of dynamic load induced to the expected occurrences and (ii) performing proper analyses focused on the single items. This latter step can be faced with various levels of computational effort, i.e., by applying simplified methods based on form-filled analyses [19,30], or more analytical approaches [31][32][33][34][35].…”