Physical restoration of a painting with a digitally constructed mask

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Kachkine, Alex
• 署名单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• 刊物名称: Nature
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0028-3598
• DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09045-4
• 发表日期: 2025-06-12
• 关键词: mural paintings; image; Visualization

摘要

Conservation of damaged oil paintings requires manual inpainting of losses1,2, leading to months-long treatments of considerable expense; 70% of paintings in institutional collections are locked away from public view, in part because of treatment cost3,4. Recent advancements in digital image reconstruction have helped to envision treatment results, although without any direct means of achieving them5, 6, 7-8. Here I describe the physically applied digital restoration of a painting, a highly damaged oil-on-panel attributed to the Master of the Prado Adoration from the late fifteenth century. In parallel, 5,612 losses spanning 66,205 mm2 and 57,314 colours were infilled with a reversible laminate mask comprising a colour-accurate bilayer of printed pigments on polymeric films. To ensure the effectiveness of the restoration, ethical principles in painting conservation were implemented quantitatively for digital mask construction, a critically important foundation lacking in the current digital restoration literature. The infill process took 3.5 h, an estimated 66 times faster than conventional inpainting, and the result closely matched the simulation. This approach grants greatly increased foresight and flexibility to conservators, enabling the restoration of countless damaged paintings deemed unworthy of high conservation budgets.