Last year, scientists used high energy X-rays to reveal that Picasso was using housepaint in some of his artwork. We have meter-scale objects that we need to be able to study down to the individual molecule," said Van Duyne. "At the end of the day, we are dealing with the same problem. Nanotechnology to study art and cultural heritage also has applications that extend into other realms of life, from the making of miniature batteries to delivering cancer treatments to patients with advanced disease. "We haven't seen the peak of that yet, so we are living in very interesting times," said Dik.
#Secrets of great art portable#
The miniaturization of analytical equipment and the portable nature of many instruments has boomed over the past decade, meaning more work can be now done inside the museums, and do not require costly or dangerous transportation of artwork. Many of the scientific techniques aimed at deconstructing paintings are anything but new-having actually begun in the late 1880s-but have been continually refined over time, experts said. Already, visitors to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam can purchase and take home their own 3-D printed Van Gogh replicas. Someday, art enthusiasts may have a completely new view-and feel-of the works by great artists. "With these digital reconstructions we are not bound by the ethical or technical limitations" that standard approaches to conservation have, he said. "We are very much interested in replicating the original painting," he told reporters at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago.Ī digital reconstruction of the flowers Van Gogh painted shows a deeper, brighter clutch of yellow flowers.ĭik's lab at the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands is now working on recreating surface texture and original color in a three-dimensional image in order to showcase what the artist did without changing his actual work. The painting and its reconstruction are now part of an exhibit that opened February 8 at the Art Institute of Chicago, showing how scientists would revive the rosy and rusty hues to restore how it might have looked back then.ĭutch scientist Joris Dik described how cadmium yellow turned grayish in Van Gogh's painting, Flowers in a Blue Vase, from 1889. "We analyzed what the molecules as they were under the frame to tell us what they should be now," said Richard Van Duyne, professor of chemistry at Northwestern University, describing a powerful X-ray and microscope technique known as surface-enhanced Raman scattering that was used on a Renoir painting from 1883, called Madame Leon Clapisson. Advanced science techniques are helping shed new light on the original beauty that has faded with time on some of the world's greatest masterpieces, experts said Thursday.īy scaling down sampling techniques to the most miniature levels, scientists can now figure out how individual molecules in a painting vibrate differently, allowing them to see the true organic colors as they were over a century ago.
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