Abstract:

Art production has propitiated a rise and speculation in art prices and consequently falsifications of paintings. In Heritage Science considerable attention is given to authenticate, dating and the determination of the provenance and the authenticity of artworks. Obviously, the study of art history and cultural heritage helps to solve falsification. Particularly, in canvas paintings it is well known that a complete and unambiguous characterisation of materials in paintings is often difficult, because of their complex structure (from inside to out: ground layer, priming layer, colouring layers and protection layer or varnish). Hence, paintings are complex micro layered composite materials made by heterogeneous mixtures of organic and inorganic components.
In order to be able to identify forgeries, several valuable tools are at the investigator’s disposal nowadays. In particular, techniques such as X-rays and radiography, infrared reflectography and ultraviolet fluorescence appeared as powerful tools for compositional imaging studies. These studies provide useful information to restorers and art historians about the under drawing, artistic technique, style, colours, iconographic analysis, surface conservation, repaints, additions, varnishes and as well as the canvas structure. During the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the scientific analysis of paintings for falsification purposes. However, an important drawback of the investigation of antiquities is the fear that the precious art work might be damaged during analysis. Hence an important aspect of art analysis is the question of sampling and avoiding damage to the artefact during the study. A possible way to maximize the information that is extracted from the painting is using several sensitive micro-analytical techniques on the same micro samples or the use of non-destructive techniques. Nowadays, different analytical methods needing sampling or not, are applied to identify pigments and binders in paintings. Among the most used instrumental techniques could be cited Proton Induced X-ray Emission (PIXE), Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA), Scanning Electron Microscopy-Energy Dispersive X-ray (SEM-EDS), Infrared Fourier Transform Spectroscopy (FT-IR), Micro-Raman Spectroscopy (MRS) and Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS). Combination of these techniques provides a powerful approach to face problems in the field of art analysis related to the characterisation of organic and inorganic components.
In this paper, a possible combination of techniques is presented that could be used to study the materials that were used to manufacture two canvas paintings with the signature of “Picasso”. In this way, pigments, binding media and varnishes could be identified and the results could help to obtain valuable historical information as well as to check the authenticity or provenance of paintings studied.

Keywords:

authentication, historical painting, research methodologies.