James' World 2

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Last summer, I polled the great art houses of Europe with a seemingly straightforward question: Had they had any recent experiences with mold in their collections?

Mold is a perennial scourge in museums that can disfigure and destroy art and artifacts. To keep this microbial foe in check, institutions follow protocols designed to deter the familiar fungi that thrive in humid settings. But it seems a new front has opened in this long-standing battle. I’d recently heard rumblings that curators in my then home base of Denmark have been wrestling with perplexing infestations that seem to defy the normal rules of engagement. I wondered how pervasive the problem might be.

My survey did not make me popular. Some museums responded quickly—too quickly, perhaps, to have checked with their curators. Ten minutes after receiving my inquiry, the press office at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence assured me unequivocally that there was no mold at the Uffizi. The museum declined to connect me with the curatorial team or restoration department. Many institutions—the Louvre, the British Museum, the Musée d’Orsay—didn’t respond to my calls and e-mails at all. I eventually came to suspect the Vatican Museum had blocked my number.

Frustrating though it was, this is the reception I expected. Asking a curator if their museum has problems with mold is like asking if they have a sexually transmitted disease. It’s contagious, it’s taboo, and it carries the inevitable implication someone has done something naughty.

Consequently, mold is spoken of in whispers in the museum world. Curators fear that even rumors of an infestation can hurt their institution’s funding and blacklist them from traveling exhibitions. When an infestation does occur, it’s generally kept secret. The contract conservation teams that museums hire to remediate invasive mold often must vow confidentiality before they’re even allowed to see the damage. But a handful of researchers, from in-house conservators to university mycologists, are beginning to compare notes about the fungal infestations they’ve tackled in museum storage depots, monastery archives, crypts, and cathedrals. A disquieting revelation has emerged from these discussions: there’s a class of molds that flourish in low humidity, long believed to be a sanctuary from decay. By trying so hard to protect artifacts, we’ve accidentally created the “perfect conditions for [these molds] to grow,” says Flavia Pinzari, a mycologist at the Council of National Research of Italy. “All the rules for conservation never considered these species.”

These molds—called xerophiles—can survive in dry, hostile environments such as volcano calderas and scorching deserts, and to the chagrin of curators across the world, they seem to have developed a taste for cultural heritage. They devour the organic material that abounds in museums—from fabric canvases and wood furniture to tapestries. They can also eke out a living on marble statues and stained-glass windows by eating micronutrients in the dust that accumulates on their surfaces. And global warming seems to be helping them spread.

Most frustrating for curators, these xerophilic molds are undetectable by conventional means. But now, armed with new methods, several research teams are solving art history cold cases and explaining mysterious new infestations.

The xerophiles’ body count is rising: bruise-like stains on Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous self-portrait, housed in Turin. Brown blotches on the walls of King Tut’s burial chamber in Luxor. Pockmarks on the face of a saint in an 11th-century fresco in Kyiv. It’s not enough to find and identify the mold. Investigators are racing to determine the limits of xerophilic life and figure out which pieces of our cultural heritage are at the highest risk of infestation before the ravenous microbes set in.

Scandinavian museums have been some of the first to confront the effect of climate change on molds. Whereas certain parts of the planet are growing drier as temperatures rise, the Nordic countries are among those that are becoming wetter. Higher temperatures allow the air to hold more moisture, and extreme rainfall events called cloudbursts are occurring more frequently. Sea-bound Denmark, for example, which is already rainy, could receive more than 50 percent more winter rainfall by the end of this century.

In decades past, local museums in Denmark could get away with storing their treasures in drafty basements, sheds, and even barns—practices that are typical for small museums around the globe when funding is limited, and they don’t have the luxury of purpose-built facilities. But rising humidity and increasing floods led to runaway mold infestations at several Danish institutions in the 2000s. In response, Danish museums invested tens of millions of dollars to develop centralized, climate-controlled storage facilities.

It’s a pattern that’s playing out in many parts of the world. As the climate becomes more erratic, museums are tightening the temperature and humidity controls for their collections to prevent mold growth. But paradoxically, these efforts may be creating the perfect niche for a different kind of mold.

In 2012, Danish museum conservator Camilla Jul Bastholm was patrolling one such climate-controlled facility—a newly retrofitted warehouse about an hour outside Copenhagen—when she spotted subtle white shimmers on a variety of items, including hats and cloaks. “It was tricky to see with the naked eye,” Bastholm says of the discoloration—“a whitish, brittle layer on the surface of the artifacts.”

Conventional wisdom would have suggested that these shimmering patches were pesticide blooms, an unfortunate legacy from past generations of conservators who sprayed their collections with pesticides such as DDT to keep insects and molds at bay. These chemicals absorbed into artifacts only to bubble up to the surface later in the form of white blotches. But Bastholm had seen these little white dots before. She was working in another repository as a contract conservator, the kind of consultant museums hire after a flood or leak. After eight hours in that facility, a colleague had “reacted like she had the beginning of the flu—her eyes running; she had a migraine.” To Bastholm, that sounded like exposure to a fungus, not a chemical.

A close examination revealed that about half of the objects in the Roskilde Museum’s facility bore these worrisome white marks. Two museum employees developed the same flu-like symptoms Bastholm had observed before. The staff were convinced they had a mold outbreak. Yet the building’s envelope was intact, with no evidence of leaks.

Twice, museum leadership called in outside technicians to test for mold, a process that involves rubbing samples of potentially contaminated material onto a fungal growth medium—a gelatinous goo packed with nutrients and moisture to jump-start mold growth in a petri dish. The dishes bloomed black, yellow, brown, and green with common molds, but nothing matched the enigmatic white marks.

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