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Restorers and curators have taken advantage of cutting-edge technology to obtain more information about the Armored Portrait of Cosimo I Medici by Italian painter Agnolo Bronzino.
This is reported Arkeo News.
The New South Wales art gallery restorers and international art curator used an X-ray fluorescence microscope (XFM) to scan the portrait. The technology has been called an essential tool for art historians and museum curators because it can non-invasively detect and map metals in paint pigments.
Renaissance artists are known to have used expensive paints containing minerals in some parts of their paintings, which can be identified with XFM. Elements mapped with XFM in the painting included mercury (present in the cinnabar red pigment), copper (found in azurite), tin (corresponding to the use of lead-tin yellow), iron (present in the ocher shade range), and manganese ( in umber), as well as trace elements, especially arsenic, in these pigments obtained from mineral deposits.
The distribution of elements was displayed in the painting, creating individual grayscale images that represent the distribution of individual elements. Tonal differences indicate different concentrations of elements.
The existence of the figure and her portrait under the portrait of Cosimo was discovered as early as the early 1980s thanks to an x-ray. The Art Gallery of New South Wales purchased the painting in 1996, but it is still unknown if the figure underneath was an earlier version of the Duke. There is a version that the image under the portrait may demonstrate early thoughts about the painting.
Cursor also reported that unique paintings were found in a monastery on the banks of the Nile.
