Stone consolidation: research and practice

Abstract

Stone consolidation has raised the interest of scientists and conservator-restorers since long ago, and, among the treatments applied to stone elements, it is the one that raises more engaging debates and larger controversy. This happens at the practical level, due to the frequent unsatisfactory and even disastrous results, but also at the research level, for the lack of common understandings, for the very personal approaches to the research protocols, and for the difficult exchange of results and viewpoints. Reported case studies on past treatments are scarce and little of well documented cases is available to complement our own knowledge. This fact strongly affects the possibility to validate the research results and therefore it also limits the capacity to transpose each one’s knowledge to the real world. On the other hand, most persons involved in this field know (documented or undocumented) a certain number of cases where consolidation has shown poor performances, possibly with fatal implications for the treated object. Sometimes this may be a consequence of insufficient preparatory studies, but it may also be due to inadequate transposition of the research results to the real practical world. These shortcomings may seem incomprehensible in face of the huge amount of papers that have been published in the last 4 decades, and yet, the actual situation still encompasses cases that do not have proved solutions, results that cannot be transposed to the real practice, novel products that do not correspond to the expected attributes, and positive performances with treatments that would be expected to fail.