Experience in the Restoration of Photographs with a Painted Layer: An Interdisciplinary Approach as an Optimal Methodological Solution

The article examines the technological features and challenges involved in the restoration of an original photographic graphic artwork: a reproduction of Raphael Santi’s painting The Sistine Madonna with a painted layer. Unlike partially hand-colored photographs, photographic prints with a continuous painted layer covered by a varnish film are extremely rare. As restoration objects, such works require a special, individualized methodological approach. The work was complicated by the fact that the restoration of graphic artworks, photographic documents, and oil paintings generally lacks technological overlap. Each of these specializations has its own range of research and restoration techniques.