In his study, Alex Kachkine, SM '23, presents a new method he's developed that involves printing the restoration on a very thin polymer film that can be carefully aligned with a painting and adhered to it or easily removed. As a demonstration, he used the method to repair a highly damaged 15th-century oil painting he owned. First he used traditional techniques to clean the painting and remove any past restoration efforts. Then he scanned the painting, including the many regions where paint had faded or cracked, and used existing algorithms to create a virtual version of what it may have looked like originally. Next, Kachkine used software he developed to create a map of regions on the original painting that require infilling, along with the exact colors needed.

Some of the world's finest oil paintings have been self-destructing, developing mysterious lumps and bumps known as'art acne'. Works by Georgia O'Keeffe and Rembrandt are among the hundreds of works blighted by the condition. For decades, art conservators have struggled to control the outbreaks, which look like grains of sand to the naked eye. But now, a team at Northwestern University in Chicago has developed an iPad software that can zoom in on the pigments closer than ever before, revealing the chemical issue at hand. In 20 seconds, the technology can scan a painting to produce a three-dimensional image of it.

Mathematics is everywhere, if you know where to look. A recently opened exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) is displaying the St. John Altarpiece, a 14th-century work by Francescuccio Ghissi. It has nine scenes in total: eight smaller pictures featuring St. John the Evangelist flanking a larger central Crucifixion. At the end of the 19th century, the altarpiece was separated into parts by a saw and eight of the nine resulting panels were sold to different collectors. One panel, the last of the smaller scenes, was lost.