Monday, March 30, 2009

Conservation Scientists

Paintings tend to fade over time, and scientists are then called in to preserve works of art. For example, some scientists developed a synthetic resin to preserve the painting "Portrait of a Man", a national treasure as a work of art. Conservation scientists, as these experts are called, have different chemical backgrounds. Some are physical chemists, yet they perform analytical analysis in order to determine the artwork's materials. Methods used include, but are not limited to "X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), SEM/EDS, gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS), X-ray powder diffraction, and compound microscopes." Organic chemists are included as well, as some have developed technology for preservation, such as the synthetic resin as mentioned before. Even future research to develop new analytical methods are underway as chemists try to develop a method to perform HPLC/MS analysis on works of art.

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/7931/7931art.html

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