Koninklijk Instituut voor het Kunstpatrimonium (KIK-IRPA), BE

About
Established in 1948, the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage is a federal scientific institution, dedicated to the Study and Conservation of Artistic and Cultural Heritage, covering a wide range of disciplines as metals, textiles, paper, leather, parchment, paintings, murals, stone works, sculpture, glass, stained glass windows, modern materials, radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology. The institute consists of an interdisciplinary infrastructure of 4 departments, the Valorisation and Communication Department, the Laboratory Department, the Restoration Department including ten conservation studios, and the Documentation Department, including a library and (online) photo library, all situated in the same building and working in close collaboration. The Laboratory Department has a long time experience in material-technical and conservation studies in the fields of art and historical objects as well as on monuments.

Relevant experience and role
KIK/IRPA participates to CHARISMA offering interdisciplinary competences in the fields of Research and Expertise focusing on the complementarities of our activities with respect to the expertise of the other partners in the consortium. Concretely it will contribute to the Networking activities in particular on the development of best practices and protocols towards common standards and the promotion of scientific excellence as well as to the Joint Research Activity taking part to the improvement of innovative methodologies and instrumentation for laboratory research.
Under the research activities KIK-IRPA will be involved specifically in the research about the “Organic material identification in micro-stratigraphies”, KIK/IRPA contributing to the opimization of the sample pretreatement for the investigation of micro-stratigraphies of reference samples and historical samples from mural paint and manuscripts and the analysis with FTIR-imaging technique.
In the research about Organic colorants in ancient and contemporary art”, main emphasis will be given to the study of the external factors at the level of the botanical sources that affect the composition of the colorants found after chromatographic analysis of new and historical textiles and to the study of the advantages and limits of different techniques for the extraction of organic colorants from textiles prior to chromatographic analysis. The actual expertise of KIK/IRPA in the field of the early synthetic dyes and recent new research on modern material will be used in the last subtask dealing with the characterisation of early synthetic colorants.

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