SMAArt Centre of Excellence (Scientific Methodologies applied to Archaeology and Art), c/o Department of Chemistry, Biology and Biotechnology, University of Perugia

To begin telling this story we must go back to the end of the last century, when, from the second half of the 1990s, a great interest in scientific methods and technologies for the study and conservation of historical and artistic heritage began to spread through the national and international scientific community. In this period, in our country the CNR and the University, the two main players in national scientific research, took up the reasons behind this interest and began to fund specific research projects, at the same time bringing the scientific disciplines within the field of cultural heritage into those of academic interest. In this context, among the CNR’s most significant lines of research was the “Cultural Heritage” Targeted Project which, launched on 28 June 1995 with funding of 115 billion old lire over five years (1996-2000), had the main aim of creating a coordinated multidisciplinary approach that would place the whole set of cutting-edge scientific and technological resources at the service of the knowledge and enhancement of the country’s artistic and archaeological heritage. In the university sphere, in application of law no. 341 of 19 November 1990, which defines the Scientific Disciplinary Sectors (SSD) to which every university lecturer is required to declare their belonging, the Ministerial Decree of 23 December 1999 introduced, among the various sectors of the chemistry area, the SSD CHIM12: Chemistry of the Environment and of Cultural Heritage, whose description reads: “The sector is concerned with the fate of natural and synthetic chemical products and their impact on the environment and on cultural heritage. Its fundamental topics are: the study of the chemical and physico-chemical parameters concerning the environment and the chemistry of pollution; the promotion of chemical and technological knowledge for the characterisation, conservation, restoration and recovery of cultural heritage.”

It was in this period that, in Perugia, our University was home to a few lecturers and researchers with an interest in these disciplines. In particular, at the Department of Chemistry (today the Department of Chemistry, Biology and Biotechnology), Prof. Gianna Favaro obtained from ENEA the funding for the first Research Doctorate Scholarship in Perugia, on a project concerning the Chemistry of cultural heritage. The related competition, within the 10th Doctoral cycle 1995/1998, was won by Dr Costanza Miliani, who thus took the first steps of a distinguished career that today sees her hold the role of Director of the CNR’s Institute of Heritage Science. In the same period and in the same Department, Professors Antonio Sgamellotti and Bruno Brunetti together laid the foundations for the creation of a cutting-edge laboratory for heritage science at our University, successfully taking part in two calls: one, European in character, for the creation of new Research Infrastructures in Europe, and one, national, for the establishment of Centres of Excellence in universities.

In particular, as regards Europe, given the limited cooperation that existed at the time between research laboratories on the conservation of cultural heritage, Professors Brunetti and Sgamellotti submitted, within the 5th Framework Programme, a project dedicated to promoting exchanges of knowledge, technologies and personnel among the various laboratories, with the main intent of pursuing a harmonisation of the modus operandi of the European institutions in the field. This project, funded by the Commission with 600,000 euros, was LabS TECH (Laboratories on Science and Technology for the conservation of the European Cultural Heritage), which brought together in joint activities 11 prestigious research and conservation institutions in Europe, including: the National Interuniversity Consortium for the Science and Technology of Materials (INSTM); the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence; the Central Institute for Restoration (ICR) in Rome; the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France (C2RMF) in Paris; the scientific laboratory of the National Gallery in London; the Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique (KIK-IRPA) in Brussels, and others. Also present, as a non-European participant, was the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) in Los Angeles.

The project, coordinated by Prof. Brunetti as a member of the INSTM Consortium, was in fact the first European network in which several research institutions, working in the field of the study and conservation of cultural heritage, operated jointly to define best practice and interdisciplinary strategies of diagnostics and intervention that would ensure, in full respect for the historical and aesthetic values of the works, a conservation of heritage founded on rigorously scientific principles.

Alongside the running of the LabS-TECH project (2000-2004), Professors Sgamellotti and Brunetti, together with Prof. Mario Torelli, who became its first President, became the promoters and founders of the SMAArt Centre of Excellence (Scientific Methodologies applied to Archaeology and Art) at our University, an Interdepartmental Centre for research and advanced training working in the field of archaeology and of the study and conservation of works of art. The Centre, founded in 2001, has a strongly inter- and multi-disciplinary character, bringing together lecturers and researchers from various Departments of the scientific and the humanistic areas of our University, along with several laboratories of the INSTM Consortium and of the CNR. The financial support came from a specific call of the Ministry of University and Research, won by our group of lecturers, within the three-year university development plan 1998-2000 (Ministerial Decree 313/99). That plan provided for the creation of university Centres of Excellence for Research, conceived as an essential step for the support and development of national inter- and multi-disciplinary research based on networked laboratory systems.

With the founding of the SMAArt centre, thanks to the experience gained within LabS-TECH, the MOLAB® mobile laboratory was also founded, the subject of this article, which represents a genuine, innovative contribution to the development of the sciences for the knowledge, conservation and enhancement of cultural heritage.

To fully grasp the importance of MOLAB® and its contribution to the development of what today is called heritage science, a brief preamble is needed. For years the conviction had taken hold among conservators and restorers around the world of just how essential a thorough knowledge of the composition of the materials of works of art and of their state of conservation is, as a preliminary and qualifying step for any restoration or preventive conservation intervention. There thus arose a pressing need to have available diagnostic methodologies capable of carrying out physico-chemical investigations that were as detailed as possible but that, at the same time, entailed no kind of damage to the work examined.

Common practice in diagnostic work applied to restoration, in the second half of the 1990s, was instead to take from the surface of the work, after a careful visual examination conducted by the restorer’s expert eye, microscopic fragments (micro-samples) which were sent to laboratories equipped for their physico-chemical characterisation. This way of proceeding could certainly yield then, and can yield even better today, interesting information, such as that concerning the stratigraphy of a painting (the succession of the preparation layers, imprimatura and paint layers with superimposed brushstrokes), but the method unfortunately suffers from two intrinsic limitations: first, taking samples, however minute, from a work of art is not ethically correct; second, the results obtained from examining a micro-sample cannot be extended to the work in its entirety, so that a single sampling is never enough for a good overall investigation of the work’s state of conservation.

In fact, the fundamental principle remains that taking even a micro-fragment from any work should always be avoided, except in cases where the removal is absolutely indispensable to clarify crucial aspects concerning the safeguarding of the work. As for the poor representativeness of micro-samples with respect to the work as a whole, one need only think of the case of a painting: if we wanted to identify all the pigments used by the artist, we would have to take at least one sample from every area of colour in which a different colour appears. Moreover, granting that the results obtained for a pigment of a certain colour are satisfactory, who can assure us that the result obtained at one microscopic point can then be generalised to all the areas that appear to be of the same colour?

It is clear from these considerations that the approach to follow for diagnostics applied to works of art is, without any doubt, the non-invasive one, that is, the one based on investigations able to provide information without any sampling of, or contact with, the work to be examined, however demanding that may be. The fundamental contribution to the development of these techniques comes from the methodologies of atomic and molecular spectroscopy, based on the interaction of light with matter.

It is at this point that the innovative scope of MOLAB® becomes clear, a mobile laboratory made up of several spectroscopic techniques that are able to examine a work in a complementary and non-invasive way, allowing measurements to be carried out that: a) are able to give diagnostic answers without even touching the surface of the object examined; b) do not require moving the work to the laboratory, because it is the laboratory that moves to the place where the work to be examined is located; c) do not even entail moving the works from the museum rooms in which they are displayed, because the investigations can be conducted in the presence of the public; d) are able to allow, easily, by bringing the scientific instrumentation inside the museum, the direct participation in the measurements not only of chemists, physicists or mineralogists, but also of all the professional figures involved in conservation, which include restorers, art historians and archaeologists.

Thus, thanks to the funding received for the creation of the SMAArt Centre, as well as to the electronic miniaturisation that made it possible to reduce the size of the instruments until then used for spectroscopy in laboratories, it was possible in 2001 to build a laboratory, equipped with light, manageable and high-performance instruments, partly purchased and partly assembled ad hoc, that were able to carry out diagnostic measurements in situ with a totally non-invasive approach in any place, from an archaeological excavation to a restoration site or a museum. The first core of instrumentation making up MOLAB®, that is, the mobile laboratory, consisted of analytical systems for measurements of: X-ray fluorescence; reflection infrared spectroscopy (FTIR); Raman micro-spectroscopy with a 532 nm laser; UV-Vis spectroscopy in absorption and emission. With this instrumentation, between 2001 and 2004, at the request of restorers or heritage authorities, both in Umbria and nationally, diagnostic interventions were carried out on numerous works, including some paintings by Perugino and by Giottesque masters at the CooBec in Spoleto, on the Pala di Bastia by Niccolò Alunno, on sculptures by Benedetto Antelami in Parma Cathedral, and also on Michelangelo’s David, on the occasion of a maintenance operation at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence. On the occasion of the exhibition entitled “Perugino il divin pittore” at the National Gallery of Umbria in 2004, several panels described the methods and results obtainable through the non-invasive approach of MOLAB®.

But this was only the beginning, because, once the European LabS-TECH project had concluded, the SMAArt Centre became the promoter and coordinator of another project, within the 6th Framework Programme of European Research, which, starting from the broad international scientific community involved in the activities of the previous project, would open a service of access to advanced scientific instrumentation for all the scholars and researchers engaged in the knowledge and conservation of the historical and artistic heritage of their own countries. The intention was to make MOLAB®, born in the SMAArt Centre, the first European mobile laboratory at the service of art historians, archaeologists, architects, restorers, and experts in preventive conservation and materials science, so as to allow them to carry out, in situ and in a non-invasive way, measurements that would otherwise be difficult or even impossible for their research.

This second project, approved and funded by the European Community with more than 5 million euros in 2004, was called Eu-ARTECH (Access, Research and Technology for the European Cultural Heritage) and comprised the joint activities of a consortium of 12 European institutions working in the field of cultural heritage conservation, many of which were already present in the earlier LabS-TECH. The long-term objective of the activities was to achieve permanent interoperability among all the laboratories of the Union, with a view to the creation of a single infrastructure in Europe in the field of heritage science. The project provided for two opportunities of access to scientific instrumentation for researchers and operators in the cultural heritage sector: 1) access to the mobile instrumentation of MOLAB® for non-invasive measurements in situ; 2) access to the fixed instrumentation of the AGLAE laboratory (Accélérateur Grand Louvre d’Analyse Élémentaire) located in the basement of the Palais du Louvre for carrying out measurements with some of the advanced methodologies of materials science. The terms of access required the submission of an application, by the researchers or scholars, consisting of a description of the research under way, with an indication of the objectives and expected results. The applications were then selected by a panel of independent international experts.

MOLAB® was at that moment a great novelty in the European scientific landscape, because never before had access activities to instrumentation and expertise been funded by the European Commission for the study and conservation of cultural heritage. In addition, that was the first time that the access activities funded by the Commission concerned a laboratory that was not located at a specific site, but that moved to the very place where the proposing researcher or scholar was carrying out their work.

In the European version, coordinated in any case by the SMAArt Centre, MOLAB® comprised six portable instruments supplied by the joint University-CNR-ISTM research group in Perugia, two by CNR-INOA, one by CNR-ICVBC and one by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, all in Florence. In total, European researchers had at their disposal ten instruments capable of investigating various physico-chemical properties of any object, determining its composition and gathering important information on its state of conservation. Many of these instruments, all at the “state of the art” at the time of their introduction, were prototypes and/or apparatus designed, modified and assembled ad hoc; a couple of examples are shown in the following images.

The success of MOLAB^© in the five years of activity of the Eu-ARTECH project is attested both by the spread of information about the work carried out, through articles and television broadcasts in the European press and media , and by the invitations to numerous specialist international conferences where MOLAB®’s interventions were presented in rich detail.

In the various Eu-ARTECH accesses, MOLAB® and its operators examined paintings by old masters (such as Bronzino, Leonardo, Caravaggio, Memling, Antonello da Messina and others) and by modern artists (such as Munch, Rothko, Cezanne, Mondrian…), medieval manuscripts such as the Macclesfield Psalter and the Book of Kells in Dublin, or istoriato and lustreware Renaissance ceramics, or monuments such as Nero’s Domus Aurea and the cathedral of Huesca, or mural paintings such as those of the Basilica of Saint Demetrius in Thessaloniki.

At the end of EU-ARTECH, the resonance and importance of this innovative transnational instrument aroused considerable interest on the part of the European Commission which, convinced of the soundness of the path undertaken, funded with 9.6 million euros a further project in which the activities of access to instrumentation and expertise would be strengthened and expanded. This project, submitted within the 7th Framework Programme, was CHARISMA (Cultural Heritage Advanced Research Infrastructures: Synergy for a Multidisciplinary Approach to Conservation/Restoration). This project too had as its lead the SMAArt Centre, which coordinated a partnership extended to as many as 22 participating institutions. To the institutions taking part in the previous projects were added other prestigious ones, such as the British Museum and the Museo Nacional del Prado, as well as other important research centres and laboratories with large-scale instrumentation. MOLAB® in CHARISMA was enriched with new instruments compared to the previous project, including a system for X-ray diffraction measurements built by the French C2RMF and a high-resolution multispectral infrared imaging system built by CNR-INOA in Florence. Among the activities planned for carrying out the project was also the design and development of a further six new portable instruments. Two of these were to be built in Italy, by our University with CNR-ISTM in Perugia and by CNR-INO in Florence, while the other four were to be built in Germany, France, Poland and Greece. In addition to the extension of the portable instrumentation, the CHARISMA project introduced two other important innovations in the access offered to European researchers and scholars: FIXLAB and ARCHLAB. In FIXLAB, besides the AGLAE Laboratory of the Palais du Louvre, access was opened to laboratories equipped with large-scale instrumentation, based on the use of neutron sources or synchrotron light, particularly suited to the detailed study of the alteration processes undergone by the materials of cultural heritage. In ARCHLAB, made up of the collective archives of several great European museums and research centres, all the laboratory information gathered over years of activity by the institutions was made available to applicants, concerning the study of the materials of the collections on display and of their alterations, not excluding the collections of micro-samples taken over the years during restoration work and carefully preserved.

The number of users who, at the end of the five years of CHARISMA, gained access to the open facility corresponds to very significant figures: researchers and scholars from 185 research projects made use of the data recorded in the ARCHLAB archives; other scholars, from 138 research projects, used the investigation methodologies made available by the FIXLAB laboratories and, finally, researchers from another 52 projects made use, in situ, of the measurements carried out by MOLAB® (the MOLAB® projects are fewer in number because they require more costly and complex logistics owing to the movements of the instrumentation). As for the 52 MOLAB interventions, carried out in 11 different countries, they include experimental measurements on works of art by some of the greatest masters of the history of European art, such as Caravaggio (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, IE), Van Gogh (Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, NL, and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, NL), Picasso (Musée Picasso in Antibes, FR, and Museu Picasso in Barcelona, ES), Memling (National Museum in Gdańsk, PL), Dürer (National Gallery in Prague, CZ), Bosch (Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, AT), and Van Eyck (Ghent Cathedral, BE).

At the end of the CHARISMA project in 2015, robust foundations were by then consolidated in Europe for the establishment of a distributed infrastructure of research laboratories sharing intervention protocols, knowledge of materials and diagnostic instruments, such as MOLAB®, all cutting-edge and all available to researchers and scholars of the old continent. On these foundations was born the IPERION_CH project (Integrated Platform for the European Research Infrastructure on Cultural Heritage), funded under the Horizon 2020 programme with around 8 million euros. The CNR was called upon to coordinate this new project. Among its main objectives, IPERION_CH set out to finalise the aggregation of the networks of national heritage-science infrastructures, scattered across Europe, into a single distributed and pan-European infrastructure. Shortly after its start, in the wake of the results previously obtained by CHARISMA, the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) placed on the European road map for the establishment of new European infrastructures the E-RIHS Infrastructure (European Research Infrastructure in Heritage Science), which will be based in Italy and will bring together under a single governance the individual national infrastructures of the participating European countries. With this last step and with the launch of the preparatory phase of E-RIHS, the access activities offered to researchers increased in quality and quantity. The FIXLAB laboratories were strengthened and the open archives of ARCHLAB increased. In this context, the European MOLAB® too grew, taking shape in 5 units distributed across Italy, France, Poland and Greece, which cooperate with one another by providing coordinated services. In particular, the number and quality of the instrumental techniques offered increased and, consequently, the quality of the service and its range of action increased. To cite a couple of the most important works on which the mobile laboratory was called to operate within IPERION_CH, we may recall the very famous Sunflowers at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and The Scream at the Munch Museum in Oslo.

To date, the E-RIHS infrastructure has completed the preparatory phase and is beginning the implementation phase, which will see its definitive launch probably in 2022. Its actual experimentation is currently under way, with the activities of the new European project IPERION HS (Integrated Platform for the European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science), which involves 24 partners, corresponding, through Joint Research Units, to as many as 32 participating institutions, distributed across 23 countries.

The E-RIHS infrastructure, as it is being tested in IPERION_HS, maintains the access rules based on the submission of research projects assessed by dedicated committees, and makes available to European researchers and scholars 14 archives in ARCHLAB and 95 different scientific investigation techniques in FIXLAB. As for the mobile instruments for non-invasive investigation directly in situ, the 2020 MOLAB® is made up of 16 units providing 48 different instruments divided among two- and three-dimensional analysis systems, multi- and hyper-spectral imaging and mapping , single-point analysis and instruments for remote monitoring, some of them mounted on drones.

In the light of these figures, one can certainly conclude that the idea of a mobile laboratory underlying MOLAB®, accompanied by the parallel branches of ARCHLAB and FIXLAB access, has proved successful and far-sighted. The example of MOLAB®, born and developed over more than 15 years of activity at our University, is today followed by numerous mobile laboratories set up in other European countries, where they carry out national access activity analogous to that of the projects described here.

Within the E-RIHS infrastructure now being established, based in Florence, MOLAB® will constitute a permanent service offered to all researchers, art historians, archaeologists, architects, restorers and preventive-conservation experts for the carrying out of their work. As already sketched out in the distant LabS TECH and Eu-ARTECH projects, the objective of E-RIHS will be the development of activities that, by promoting the interdisciplinary use of the most advanced technologies (from the large installations to the in situ analytical methodologies), make the study, enhancement and conservation of our heritage an activity founded on rigorously scientific methods and applications.

Aldo Romani. Having graduated in Chemistry at the University of Perugia in 1987, he obtained the title of Research Doctor (4th Cycle) at the same University in 1992 and is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry, Biology and Biotechnology of the University of Perugia, where he holds the courses in Chemistry of Cultural Heritage for the three-year Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and Environmental Chemistry, and in Analytical Techniques for Environmental and Cultural Heritage Chemistry for the Master’s degree in Chemical Sciences. His research activity involves both aspects of basic study and applied aspects concerning the characterisation of molecular excited states by means of the parameters that govern their radiative and non-radiative relaxation processes, and the use of absorption and emission spectroscopic techniques for non-invasive diagnostic purposes in the cultural heritage sector.