When the brave defenders of Amsterdam in Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642) strode out into the unknown, they were certainly not on the lookout for bugs. But a new project at the Dutch city’s Rijksmuseum will for the first time measure the bacteria on one of the world’s best-known paintings.
As part of the five-year “Operation Night Watch”, a restoration and research project taking place behind a glass wall in the Rijksmuseum, scientific experts will spend six months sampling areas of the painting, both with and without varnish, for bug life. The research is conducted in partnership with Artis-Micropia, a microbes museum that is part of Amsterdam zoo. The samples will be cultured and presented at Artis-Micropia in the installation The Night Watch Lives (from 11 November). This work will comprise a life-sized reproduction of The Night Watch, illustrating which microorganisms live on it and where.
“The idea was to find out what we can extract from the surface of the painting in relation to the public,” says Katrien Keune, the head of science at the Rijksmuseum. “Whenever we walk around, we lose our bio-material. When you speak, you have your saliva reaching out. A curator thought: can we find how visitors are represented on the The Night Watch?”
Keune adds: “Ideally, you want to have the bacteria of Rembrandt: this is the Holy Grail. I think bacteria can survive for a very long time. A lot of research focuses on finding something like DNA or a fingerprint, because you get close to the artist.”
Recent research at the Rijksmuseum showed that, unlike his 17th-century contemporaries who prepared their canvases with a layer of glue, Rembrandt used an oil-lead mixture to stop his works going mouldy in Amsterdam’s damp buildings. This may have had a preventative effect on microbial growth. But in order to preserve such masterpieces, apart from gentle daily maintenance, they are only deep-cleaned around once every 50 years.
Eline van Bloois, a microbiologist at Artis-Micropia, hopes that the project will do wonders for the reputation of bacteria. “The comparison between a massive masterpiece and this invisible life is already amazing,” she says. “Often, they get a bit of a bad reputation, but microbes are not inherently good or bad.”
Van Bloois points out it is estimated that only a tiny fraction of microbes can cause illness in humans or animals. “We also know that, in some cases, it actually also helps train our immune system to be exposed to some of those microbes that may be able to cause usually minor disease,” she says. “It’s good to give microbes some love as well.”
