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As contemporary artists’ practices evolve to incorporate ever-newer forms and approaches, conservators are encountering challenges not met before, that influence the development of sustainable and green treatment methods and materials. Many challenges stem from how we understand and articulate authenticity and cultural heritage. In approaching authenticity, the conservation field seeks to rely on reliable knowledge, supplied by science that has been playing an ever more critical role in conservation and technical art history. While conservation science techniques are relatively well-known to conservators, the foundational ethos of the scientific inquiry that distinguishes science from other intellectual pursuits needs to be clarified. Exploration of the foundational ethos of science and the philosophy of science has lacked in conservation, which creates communication problems for stakeholders with different backgrounds: curators, conservators, art historians, and scientists, who operate in different realms, but need to produce knowledge across disciplines and collectively. To bridge this knowledge gap in authenticity questions, the authors take the perspective of the philosophy of science and discuss what makes the scientific inquiry distinct from other intellectual pursuits in the context of conservation. As a workable solution for cultural heritage, the authors propose adopting a concept of scientific attitude as a science demarcation criterion, introduced by Lee McIntyre. The new demarcation criterion, based on values rather than methodology, offers a sustainable approach to defining the role of present-day science in cultural heritage and building sustainable connections with diverse frameworks of knowledge used in conservation and authenticity questions.

Mild heating devices currently available to conservators are still limited in terms of precision, versatility, mobility, accessibility and cost. Moreover, they lack a range of operational features, such as low power requirements, efficient power use, temperature stability and uniform heat distribution. Carbon nanotube- based technologies can provide a wide range of technical solutions for overcoming these limitations, thereby allowing the development of more precise, flexible and portable heating devices. This work describes the design of an innovative carbon nanotube-based intelligent mobile accurate thermo-electrical mild heating device, to be used in the art conservation field. The device consists of three different types of flexible heating mats with different designs (opaque and ultra-thin/woven and breathable/transparent) and different operational and physical properties. The entire heating system is completed by a control unit that controls, monitors and registers the heating and by a power supply unit. First tests performed on a series of prototypes of the designed heaters showed that the device was able to convey uniform heating on different working materials, thus proving to be effective for thermal consolidation.