Characterising appearance of gold foils and gilding in conservation and restoration

Abstract

Materials with complex optical properties like gold foils are commonly used for gilding in the field of conservation and restoration to render the visual appearance of the restoration object. Characterising the appearance of these materials is important to render an accurate visual appearance that can be obtained with different gilding techniques. In this paper, the bidirectional reflectance of gold foils commonly used for gilding is characterised and as well as gilding mock-ups. The dataset of gold foils is publicly available.