Conservation principles

Paper conservation tallies with the conservation of objects mainly constituted by vegetable organic materials (paper, cardboard…) or animal organic materials (leather, parchment). In the category, you can find various objects like books, manuscripts, drawings, prints, posters, maps and plans. They can be flat of tridimensional. They are also defined by the media used to pass on their information (written by hand, printed, drawn…).

Conservation respects different rules and objectives. First of all, it has to assure the artwork’s sustainability, that is to preserve it the longer and in the best conditions. In the other hand, conservation has to help to find again readability of the artwork, giving back the sense of the shapes and the representations that can have been partly damaged by time. In the end, conservation has to respect imperatively the artwork’s integrity. So, its prime sense and the materials constituting it have to be preserved and can’t be affected by the conservation operations.

Conservation answers to different ethics which are mandatory to respect and which guide the conservator in his work. First of all, all the materials used for the conservation have to be stable physically and chemically in time. They also need to be compatible with all the materials composing the artwork. On the other hand, every operation realized on an artwork has to be reversible, so that one can find again the initial state of the artwork at any moment, without damaging it. Finally, the operations realized on the documents have to remain visible so that one can discern which part of the document is original and which part has been restored. This obviously can’t hamper the readability of the artwork.