AIC's 47th Annual Meeting

The restoration of gilding is a perennial challenge for conservators working on a broad range of objects. Architectural elements, sculpture, paintings, and works on paper can all be gilded. Gilded surfaces are fragile, frequently damaged, and difficult to treat. Current options for ingilding are expensive like gold leaf or powder, unstable like composition leaf and bronze powder, or have undesirable visual properties like mica paint and powder. Despite their generally poor hiding power and limited specularity micaceous interference paints have become the standard material used for the restoration of losses to gilded surfaces. This is primarily because of their low cost and ease of application. However, in the past two decades there have been tremendous advances in the creation of new pigments meant to imitate the appearance of metallic surfaces. Instead of coated flakes of mica, they are based on borosilicate flakes, coated aluminum flakes, or coated bronze flakes. These pigments are usually intended for the automotive, printing, and cosmetics industries. Because of their intended applications these pigments are can be light stable as well as easy and safe to use. Some of them, particularly those based upon metallic flakes, may more closely approximate the appearance of gold leaf than micaceous paint. Their advantages include increased specularity, a smoother texture, and increased hiding power. The goal of this poster will be to discuss some of these new alternative materials and indicate promising areas for future inquiry. Samples have already been procured from manufacturers of these pigments. Using the samples provided, test boards will be prepared in which the pigments are applied over a variety of colored grounds and given finishing treatments including burnishing and varnishing. These test boards will allow easy comparison between the new materials, mica paint, and actual gilding. The poster will showcase the sample boards, as well as compare and contrast the visual properties and handling characteristics of the pigments. It will conclude with suggestions for future investigation in the topic.