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In 2008 Pilar Roig, a Spanish art conservationist, was struggling to restore a series of paintings by Baroque painter Antonio Palomino preserved inside Valencia’s Santos Juanes church in southern Spain.
The paintings, a series of frescoes completed by Palomino in the early 18th century, had been pulled from the walls within the church in the 1960s and then glued back on. Decades later, that glue was proving very hard to remove.
When Roig’s daughter, a prospective biology student, stumbled upon a scientific paper describing the use of bacteria for restoring ancient art, she decided to pursue a PhD in that subject.
Today, Pilar Roig and her daughter are working together to use glue-eating bacteria in art restoration projects.
"My mother had a very difficult problem to solve and I found a paper about bacteria used to clean frescoes in Italy," Roig’s daughter told Reuters.
As Roig explained to Reuters, restorers used to remove glue with warm water and sponges, a time-consuming technique that often caused damage to artworks. Instead, thanks to her daughter’s PhD investigation, she now relies on tiny bacteria that naturally feed on the glue without damaging the underlying surfaces. This technique was used by Bosch in restoration projects across Europe, from Pisa, Italy, to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain.
The mother-and-daughter bacteria-fueled restoration project has recently secured $4.46-million in funding from local foundations to restore artworks in Valencia, including those in St. Nicholas church, known as Valencia’s Sistine Chapel.
This is not the first time that multiple generations of the family have joined forces to restore Valencia’s artworks. Pilar Rogi’s father and grandfather were both involved in art restoration in the city and Roig started to help out at her grandfather's art restoration workshop when she was just eight years old. Now, the addition of her microbiologist daughter to her restoration projects is ensuring that Valencia’s restoration jobs are kept in the family.
