In a hilltop palace, what was once gilded is no longer gold. And scientists have found a chemical culprit.
Medieval artisans crafted some Alhambra ceilings to look like a cave’s stalactites, then gilded them with a layer of tinfoil topped by a gold-and-silver alloy. In the 19th century, people covered the degrading gilding with gypsum, a white mineral found in plaster.
Faint purple stains caused by gold spheres invisible to the naked eye mar decorations on structures in Spain’s Alhambra palace. The blue color is the pigment lapis lazuli.Cardell’s colleague Carmen Navarrete, a former head of restoration at the Alhambra, died before the team could get answers. Cardell and electron microscopy expert Isabel Guerra, also of the University of Granada, soldiered on without Navarrete to examine layers of gilding, gypsum and stains from the Alhambra.
In this electron microscope image, gold nanospheres detach from the surface of a damaged gold-silver alloy layer of gilding on Spain’s Alhambra citadel.In this electron microscope image, gold nanospheres detach from the surface of a damaged gold-silver alloy layer of gilding on Spain’s Alhambra citadel.Different parts of the gold were thus exposed to different oxygen concentrations.
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