[angelic orchestral music] My name is Sara, and I
am an art conservator at Center Art Studio. I am going to walk you
through how my team and I restore a 19th-century
Italian marble sculpture and its alabaster base. So it's been broken, it's been previously repaired. It came to us broken again. This work of art is comprised of four separate pieces. That includes the marble bust, its socle base, and a pedestal, which is in two parts, a top and a column. We're going to clean the
bust, the socle base, and the pedestal
components all separately. We start out on all of the pieces by using a surfactant detergent diluted in distilled water and spray it onto the
marble and the alabaster. We want to use what we need to properly clean a piece, but we never want to do anything that's too harsh.
And this surfactant is very gentle, and it lifts the dirt off the surface, kind of breaks the surface tension between the dirt and the surface, and allows us to wipe or swab away the accumulated surface dirt and debris. The column is quite dirty, and this is because a pedestal column sits on the floor and the dirt from the
floor, from people's shoes, it all gets brought up onto that surface. We also use surfactant gels, particularly in areas that might be a little bit more stubborn to clean.
When restoring something so old, you have to be mindful
of the age of the piece. So we never want to remove all of the dirt out of all of the recesses and completely remove the patina that's built up on an item of age because that would end up looking incorrect and inappropriate. So the top of the pedestal
and the socle base that the bust sits directly on have both been previously repaired twice with the same types of glue. We need to entirely remove all of this old adhesive that's not functional, it's yellowing, it's not good for the marble to have on its surface. So we want to make sure
we get all of it off. So we are using a combination of scalpels. This is also a time where you have to be very careful because marble is very susceptible and alabaster is very, very susceptible to scratching.
So when you're using
those very sharp tools you want to make sure that you are only scraping off the glue and you're not accidentally nicking the surrounding surface area. We use a number of visual aids to help us in the conservation process. One tool that's very helpful is a small spotlight. This is a very direct, targeted light that allows us to very
clearly see the area that we are working on. We also use a black light,
which is very useful because the UV light allows us to see imperfections and residues on the surface that are not visible to
the regular human eye. To attach the broken items back together, we are going to use a
special conservation epoxy. It is called Epo-Tek.
This is a two-part epoxy that you combine together. When you first mix it,
it can be quite liquidy, so we allow it to sit
for a little bit of time just to develop little bit more of a viscous quality. We are going to permanently
attach the marble to the socle base.
We're going to reuse
the original metal rod. Once we have it at the right depth, we put the pin in the hole of the bust and we use our epoxy,
pour that into the recess. And then we put the base on the marble, check it for alignment, front to back and left to right, and allow that to cure for a little while. To ensure that the repair of the top of the pedestal
is extremely strong, we are going to pin the pieces in addition to epoxying them. We are going to take
a stainless-steel rod. Stainless steel is desirable because it's not going to rust or change over time. We mark on the outside of the piece where we're going to drill holes to take the pins. And we are using our ancient drill press. Once we have the holes, we have the pins, we then can use our epoxy to attach the two pieces back together. We are going to fill the cracks in the sculpture with plaster. We are applying the plaster with small metal tools.
We tend to err on the side of overfilling because it's very easy to remove the plaster material. The plaster cures quickly, so you want to make sure that you're getting enough on while it's still workable. Once we've filled the cracks and we've allowed the
plaster to fully dry, we are going to sand, particularly the alabaster base, which had a large crack throughout the entire thing. We are going to sand that down with different grits of sandpaper. In painting, a marble sculpture is really the same technique that we use for any other sculpture or a painting. We are using our standard
Gamblin Conservation Colors. We mix them up to get the right color. In this instance, because the marble and the alabaster are sort of translucent, it makes our job a little trickier because we're trying to
replicate translucency on an opaque fill.
In this instance, you
really can't mix one color and apply it to the whole fill. You have to do thin
washes of different colors to mimic the texture and the veining of the stone material. We are going to polish the alabaster base, and we use a very large
polishing wheel for this. And we use polishing compound
applied to the wheel, and that polishing compound comes in a variety of grits. We use very fine ones in this instance so it doesn't damage the alabaster. The final step of the conservation is to wax each piece of the sculpture.
So we are using a very, very fine microcrystalline wax. And we apply this over the whole surface of
each one of the pieces, allow it to dry for just a little bit, and then buff it off very gently with soft cloths. This wax is important. It not only makes the
stone look good visually, it also serves as a protective layer between the stone and the elements. Once all of the components are complete in their own right, we do a final assembly, and this is how the piece will be ultimately displayed at the client's home. We are very satisfied with how the whole piece came out. We know the client loves this piece and has had it broken for a long time.
We think she's going be very happy. [bright, jaunty music].