The museums of University of São Paulo gather important historical and cultural patrimony in its collections with different collections of artwork, objects, iconographic and textual documents, national and international, of great cultural and ethnologic value. Those works are constituted of several materials which is a problematic for their conservation. Therefore, the museums search for technical-scientific resources to better characterization, identification and conservation of their collection. 

The need for a systematical study of those collections to aid the conservation department of the museums and to understand the materials and their change throughout time caused a closer cooperation between exact science researchers, conservators, restorers, curators and art historians and this has been of great importance to scientific research in different museums all over the world.

 

In Europe and the USA, systematical studies utilizing scientific techniques on artworks are frequently realized a few decades ago. In Brazil, some scientific works on this theme only started to appear in the end of the 1990s.

A methodic and systematic study of an artwork, textual document or object, help us comprehend the materials and techniques applied on its production and what happened to in throughout time. The gathered information through scientific analysis are interpreted, simultaneously, with the knowledge of its trajectory, allowing, thereby, to locate the “object” in the context of its own time and comprehend it, today, in its material dimension. 

Finally, this project is intended to formalize and make systematic the cooperation, that already is happening, between the different museums and institutes to this identifications.