O caso de estudo da intervenção de conservação e restauro em duas pinturas murais do vestíbulo do Edifício Rodrigues Cardoso (Av. do Brasil, nº 523 - Porto)

Abstract

The conservation and restoration intervention took place in the Rodrigues Cardoso Building located at Avenida do Brasil nº523 in Foz do Douro, as part of an intervention carried out by the company Susana Lainho Unipessoal Lda. This dissertation focuses on the treatment of two wall paintings in seco technique, dated from 1913. The building with a characteristic typology of the end of the nineteenth century beginning of the twentieth century during this dissertation research was in a rehabilitation phase under the responsibility of the company Sá Machado & Filhos, Lda. The wall paintings are part of the decorative ambient of the entrance hall of the building, one was in good condition and the other had considerable damage produced by the deterioration process with loss of material caused by the rise of soluble salts. For a correct intervention, the following steps were done: photographic documentation, damage mapping, collection of samples for analysis, diagnosis of the state of conservation, intervention proposal development and cleaning treatment execution, pre-fixing, treatment of soluble salts, consolidation of the support layer, chromatic and preparation layer planning, lacuna felling, chromatic reintegration and application of a protective coating, and lastly, the development of a preventive conservation proposal. This intervention was restricted only to the wall paintings and did not extend to the entire decorative paintings, even with evidence of their existence, which did not allow us to restore the original reading to the walls. The interest is the existing records of decorative paintings in the vestibule led us to study its historical context in the nineteenth and twentieth century by analyzing the houses in which the paintings appeared. To verify the possible existence of homonymous records in the Foz do Douro area, we started the conception of a methodology and an artistic inventory of the bourgeois houses in the area, focusing on the houses’ entrance vestibule decorations, their current state and the vestibules’ function. This dissertation allowed the creation of a case study directed to the intervention in built cultural heritage with the problem of insertion in an ongoing rehabilitation and the beginning of contributions to the development of an inventory of bourgeois houses of cultural interest in Foz do Douro.

Date of Award	10 Mar 2022
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Eduarda Vieira (Supervisor) & Rui Bordalo (Co-Supervisor)