Ricerc@Sapienza

The study of pigments is of fundamental importance for authentication and restoration purposesof painted artworks. To this aim reflectance spectroscopy has been widely studied on samples and in a number of real cases. A number of valuable efforts have been dedicated to this quest; however,the identification of a pigment on a painting surface by means of reflectance spectroscopy appears to bepossible only in very few casesalso due to the fact that artist materials are often mixed. In this paper we review a number of relevant works and present results on a new set of test samples especially produced for exploring the possibilities of reflectance spectroscopyon pigment mixtures. We also include a case study of a real painting.