In 2021, thanks to the support of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Cuneo, the JRC ‘La Venaria Reale’ and the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the University of Turin (MAET) promoted an ambitious project to study and restore one of the oldest mummified bodies of ancient Egypt in the Museum’s anthropological collection. The interdisciplinary study project involved the Superintendence of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Metropolitan City of Turin, the Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology of the University of Turin and the J|medical medical centre, where the finding was subjected to the latest generation of computed tomography. The extraordinary outcome of the project was the monographic exhibition ‘L’Uomo unveiled. Studies and restoration of a 4,500-year-old Egyptian mummy’ (Bra, Palazzo Mathis, 9 September-12 December 2021).

The restoration of the Ushak carpet was carried out in 2021 as part of the ‘A plot to unveil’ project aimed at enhancing the product at its exhibition in the Galleria Giorgio Franchetti at the Ca’ d’Oro. A joint action between the Veneto Regional Museums Directorate, the Giorgio Franchetti Gallery at Ca’ d’Oro, the bag salad producer Gli Orti di Venezia, Nova COOP and the JRC Textile Artifacts Restoration Laboratory.

[In the photograph: detail of the work]

In 2019 the precious tapestry was the subject of a delicate restoration intervention, the phases of which were told on the occasion of the exhibition The plots of Raphael. The restoration of the tapestry Madonna del Divino Amore of the Pontifical Museum of Loreto at the Ceramics Museum of Mondovì.

The large linen sheets are part of the famous funeral kit of architect Kha’s wife, now on display at the Egyptian Museum in Turin. This large sheet probably constituted the outermost textile wrapping layer of Merit's mummy, however it was separated from the body at an unspecified time and preserved in a fragmentary state until its arrival at the JRC laboratories, where it was studied and subjected to a complex restoration intervention.

[In the photograph: detail of the work]

The restoration work carried out in 2022 on the large gilded and painted corame of the Museo Civico d’Arte Antica in Turin was aimed at setting it up at Palazzo Te in Mantua on the occasion of the important temporary exhibition The Walls of Wonders. Courts between the Gonzaga and Europe.

The restoration of two indigenous-South American textile artefacts by the Antonio Ratti Foundation in Como was a valuable opportunity to study two ethnographic artefacts of great importance. The study of the executive technique and the constituent materials, supported by an in-depth campaign of diagnostic investigations, and the examination of the problems of the two finds have made it possible to develop new solutions for their conservation and enhancement.