Chemical speciation of A Revolution In Art History

A revolution in art happened in the 15th century: The transition from tempera to oil painting in Italy marked the beginning of the great period of Renaissance art and the creation of some of the most revered masterpieces of all time.

Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Leonardo da Vinci, are examples of artists who were shifting away from the use of predominantly egg-based tempera to the use of oil. But how did this transition occur? The simplistic assumption that pigments were solely either mixed with egg or oil-based binding media has been rejected.

Artists continued to use egg in parallel or in combination with oil, and prepared paints and binding media of complex chemistry, which is still not understood today.

The overarching goal of ARIAH (A Revolution In Art History) is to discover the atomic- and molecular-level chemical composition of mixed media paint layers (oil-protein mixtures) in original Renaissance artefacts and map the distribution of their constituents at the nanoscale, to understand the revolution of painting techniques in Renaissance Italy.

The project will tackle this challenge by introducing, for the first time, high-resolution X-ray Raman Scattering (XRS), 2D and 3D XRS chemical speciation imaging, and scanning transmission x-ray microscopy in combination with mass spectrometry of painting samples.

We will establish an analytical protocol based on the techniques, which will be released to the scientific community to serve as a benchmark for the molecular and atomic-level understanding of artworks.

Atomic and molecular data will contribute to the most ambitious objective of understanding the materiality and the technology of the transition from egg to oil in Renaissance Italy.

Results of this interdisciplinary research will be widely disseminated within the art history, chemical science and physical science communities by following an open access policy.