Description:
Europe brings together several thousand historic houses and hundreds of castle-museums with collections and decorations. Fundamental cultural and religious heritages, these places are often open to the public in order to ensure transmission. The conservation and alterations of these historic works, of heterogeneous typologies, are intrinsically linked to the monuments that house them. Five institutions based in France, Italy and Poland came together to share their resources and establish a simple and flexible method to effectively conserve the heritage of Europe’s historic houses. The Château de Versailles and its Research Centre, the Network of European Royal Residences (ARRE), the Foundation Centre of Conservation-Restoration “La Venaria Reale” in Turin and the Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanόw in Warsaw joined forces to establish a new approach to the conservation and presentation to the public of European historic houses and their contents. The tools developed within the framework of the EPICO program aim at sustainable management of the collections which will prevent the acceleration of degradation and the need for restoration. By identifying the conservation priorities, by evaluating and controlling the deterioration factors, the application of this new method makes it possible to develop a preventive conservation strategy for the collections of historic homes, with the aim of preserving the condition of the works, spirit of the place.