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Energy sensitive X-ray radiography for the non-destructive inspection of historical paintings
Žemlička, J. ; Jakůbek, J. ; Hradil, David ; Hradilová, J. ; Kroupa, M. ; Mislerová, H.
The technical composition of painted artworks is usually very complex and they belong to the most sophisticated cultural heritage artefacts. In the field of their inspection there is a rising demand for the non-destructive imaging and analytical methods which are able to reveal the inner composition of investigated objects. Several non-invasive methods based on the interaction of ionizing radiation with the matter have been successfully utilized during the last decades. These methods can be divided into two main groups. The better known are transmission methods (e.g. classical X-ray radiography) the less-used are emission methods (e.g. X-ray fluorescence imaging). The quality of the obtained image is highly dependent on the imaging characteristics of the used detector. The presently used ones (CCD cameras and CMOS sensors) create the image from analogue signal by the charge integration. This image is usually degraded by the presence of noise. This complication is exceeded by novel pixel detectors of Medipix family based on single particle digital counting. Furthermore these devices offer very high contrast (in principle unlimited) in the obtained image. The image can be acquired with spatial resolution better than one micrometer. Another advantage of these detectors is their ability to directly measure the energy of incident particles. This feature can be used for energy sensitive X-ray radiography (i.e. multi-channel images) and X-ray fluorescence mapping of the surface elemental composition. For the purposes of this work the laboratory ALMA in Prague prepared several multilayer samples of paints using different pigments. The results of mentioned methods applied on the test samples are summarized in this article. The first goal of these measurements is to build a comprehensive methodology for the application of these procedures in the laboratory.
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Energy sensitive X-ray radiography for the non-destructive inspection of historical paintings
Žemlička, J. ; Jakoubek, J. ; Kroupa, M. ; Hradil, David ; Hradilová, J. ; Mislerová, H.
Pigments containing iron, although they form a very large group, have never been considered very suitable for datation of color layers and identification of the origin of the painting, due to their abundant occurrence in nature, good availability and widespread use in all historical and pre-historical periods of time. In this paper we have verified that mineralogical composition of clay minerals in earthy pigments is a suitable tool for more detailed specification of material provenance and, in the case of ground layers, also the provenance of the artwork as such. It was obviously convenient to preferably use raw materials from a close and thus also cheaper source. For the purposes of statistical comparison we evaluated elemental composition of earthy grounds on 70 paintings from the 16(th)-18(th) centuries from Czech collections. We performed detailed mineralogical analyses for a selected representative number of grounds on 35 samples in total. We discerned 6 types of material in total 2 types of boles, 3 types of other earths, and one type representing iron-rich red from oxidized zones of hydrothermal ore deposits. We were able to distinguish between earthy pigments of Central European origin (coming from Czech and Bavarian locations) and those coming from North-Italian sources. Thus we were able to assign anonymous paintings to an appropriate place of origin.
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