Conservation around the Millennium (Hungarian National Museum, 2001)
Pages - 63
substances e.g. the brew of mallow root).9 This made binding slower but gypsum becomes bone-hard after drying. The solidity of the filling material did not slacken even during the treatment, so we could not remove the filling from the head of the snake, which was incomplete, very thin and entirely crystallised, for fear of annihilating it. At other parts as the locks of hair and some areas of the crest, we succeeded in removing these fillings. Probably the application of a fabric, which reinforced gypsum, was contemporary to reinforcement with gypsum. They were fixed with glue. Another fabric fixed with synthetic resin marked the next restoration stage.10 Probably this was the time when the helmet was “conserved in vacuum”.11 Most of the fillings were made with the so-called “Baki’s magic paste".12 The helmet was in a very bad condition when I got it. The bond of the adhesives weakened, some of the fillings fell out and the fabrics that had to reinforce the adhesion were hanging out. The surface of the object, due to a thick layer of cerezin, seemed to be uniform in a blackish brown colour. The magic paste or Baki's paste could nearly totally be removed with simple heating. Much of the cerezin could also be wiped off during heating (60-70 °C). The easiest would have been to the wax from the object in a hot alkaline bath, which we could not do because of the tinned surface. What remained was eliminate in white spirit and dissolving in surface-active substances. After cleaning, the surface of the helmet showed green corrosion spots both on the tinned surfaces and where there was no tin (fig. 4). Before going on with cleaning, we had to remove the still sticking rough fabrics from the interior of the helmet. Then the traces of tearing had to be fixed. As the material of the helmet was very thin and some deformation had to be corrected with pulling the material back to place with the adhesive, we used Japanese tissue, glass mat or silk fabric where it was necessary for reinforcement. Glueing was made with Eporezit R313 epoxy type adhesive resin. This type of correction of the fragments was followed by filling in the defects. First we roughly shaped the missing parts from plasticine and covered them with silicone reinforced with gauze. The resin was removed from the inside and after cleaning it from grease, we completed the filling with coloured filled Eporezit FM 2014 epoxy resin. After the removal of the silicon we finished the fillings. The cleaning of the helmet could be carried on only after this phase had been finished. The removal of the grease was followed by mechanic clearing. We thought of cleaning with a solution specially developed for tinned bronze15, but since we have not tested 4. Roughly shaped filling 63
