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.

The centuries can leave their mark on oil paintings as wear and tear and natural ageing produce cracks, discoloration and patches where pieces of pigment have flaked off. Repairing the damage can take conservators years, so the effort is reserved for the most valuable works, but a fresh approach promises to transform the process by restoring aged artworks in hours. The technique draws on artificial intelligence and other computer tools to create a digital reconstruction of the damaged painting. This is then printed on to a transparent polymer sheet that is carefully laid over the work. To demonstrate the technique, Alex Kachkine, a graduate researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, restored a damaged oil-on-panel work attributed to the Master of the Prado Adoration, a Dutch painter whose name has been lost, as a late 15th-century painting after Martin Schongauer.