Past, present and future effects of climate change on a wooden inlay bookcase cabinet: A new methodology inspired by the novel European Standard EN 15757:2010

This article illustrates a preventive conservation methodology for wooden collections and objects based on the respect of the historic climate, as established by the European standard EN 15757:2010. This requires the knowledge of the past indoor climate that should be kept unchanged in the present and the future, because discontinuities would be noxious for conservation. To this aim, a very vulnerable object, i.e. a wooden inlay bookcase cabinet built by G.M. Platina in 1477 AD has been considered. The paper illustrates the methodology used to reconstruct the historic climate, i.e. with proxy data from 1500 to 1715 and from 1716 to 2009 with instrumental observations. For the present, the indoor climate of the exhibition room and the cabinet response have been investigated to remove the perturbing factors that are damaging the cabinet. For the future, the ENSEMBLES model has been used for a probabilistic forecast of the temperature and humidity over the next century, the sustainability and the potential risk for conservation connected with the expected climate change. This research constitutes an example of a novel methodology based on the relevance of the Historic climate, and includes a synergistic effort of climatologists, material scientists and conservators, to be applied for preventive conservation and to evaluate and face the negative impact of the expected climate change.