The talk will discuss what interdisciplinary teams involving scientists, conservators, and art historians at The Met, together with colleagues in numerous other institutions including Brookhaven National Laboratory, have begun to unravel about the permanence of artistic materials in iconic works of art by Rembrandt van Rijn, Vincent van Gogh, Jan van Eyck, Adolph Gottlieb, Margareta Haverman, and others, by joining forces and combining different backgrounds, what the implications of these findings for the conservation and preservation of the works affected are, and the challenges that still lie ahead.