Imaging method for eye disease used to eye art forgeries

Piotr Targowski notes that easel paintings prepared according to traditional techniques consist of multiple layers. The artist, for instance, first applies a glue sizing over the canvas to ensure proper adhesion of later layers.

Those layers may include an outline of the painting, the painting itself, layers of semitransparent glazes, and finally transparent varnish. Art conservators and other experts resort to a variety of technologies to see below the surface and detect changes, including forged signatures and other alterations in a painting. But those approaches may damage artistic treasures or not be sensitive enough to detect finer details.

The scientists describe how OCT, used to produce three-dimensional images of the layers of the retina of the eye, overcomes those difficulties. They used OCT to analyze two oil paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries. In one, “Saint Leonard of Porto Maurizio,” OCT revealed evidence that the inscription “St. Leonard” was added approximately fifty years after completion of the painting. In the other, “Portrait of an unknown woman,” OCT found evidence of the possible of forgery of the artist's signature.

ARTICLE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE “Structural Examination of Easel Paintings with Optical Coherence Tomography”

DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT ARTICLE http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ar900195d

CONTACT:
Piotr Targowski, Ph.D.
Institute of Physics
Nicolaus Copernicus University
Torun, Poland
Phone: 0048 56 611-32-06
Fax: 0048 56 622-53-97
Email: ptarg@fizyka.umk.pl
Web: www.fizyka.umk.pl/~ptarg