An artistic masterpiece may be timeless, but that doesn’t protect it from time itself. Dust, fungi, bacteria, human DNA: All these and more accumulate, microscopically and sometimes more, on the surfaces of artworks when they’re stored, displayed, or moved outside of ideal conservation conditions. Many works now safely encased in museums still bear scars from centuries of this kind of exposure, even if it is not visible to the naked eye. A new study, published in November 2020 in Frontiers in Microbiology, put seven original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci…
