The tapestries now reside in the cathedral's textile laboratory.
"There are chunks that are salvageable," said Marlene Eidelheit, director of the cathedral's textile laboratory, as she and her staff spread the hangings out on the cathedral floor.
Six other Barberini tapestries are in the textile laboratory, which is on the cathedral's south side, far from yesterday's fire.
The restorers in the textile laboratory have already finished work on five tapestries, and are working on a sixth, according to Valerie Soll, one of the staff's four full-time conservationists.
Professor Juan Hinestroza, a chemical engineer at Cornell University, set up the textile nanotechnology laboratory to explore the interface between materials science and fashion.
A maintenance worker first noticed the trouble three weeks ago, when one of the birds began wheezing and would not eat any of the grain that is poured each day into its roost, a cubbyhole beneath the cathedral's textile conservation laboratory.
Today, the dresses live on the villa's fourth floor, in a room that has been refitted as a textile-conservation laboratory, in conservator's boxes that resemble coffins.
Dyes are examples of such wastes and are increasingly being used in pharmaceutical, paint, textile industries and laboratories as indicators.
Companies such as LMB are the current laboratories of textile reuse.
Small quantities of iron-tannate dyed silk [12], New Zealand flax [3], and raffia [13] yarns/fibre bundles and textiles have been produced in laboratories by several researchers.
