Course description
The course aims to illustrate the responses that various non-invasive examination techniques can provide for specific cognitive questions, through the presentation of a broad panorama of case studies. In combination with interdisciplinary skills and approaches, in-depth knowledge of a work of art’s material aspects helps to define new elements also for its assessment in art historical and stylistic terms as well as its condition.
Target audience
The course is designed for specialists and professionals in the field (restorers, restoration technicians, art historians, architects, scientists, registrars, museum curators and cultural heritage professionals) and for anyone wishing to update their skills and knowledge in the context of cultural heritage restoration and conservation.
Programme
The contribution that diagnostic examination makes to the study of a work of art is now common knowledge. From research strictly confined in the past to the discovery of conservation issues, modern diagnostic methodology applied to cultural heritage has made it clear that it is possible to achieve a characterisation of the materials making up a work of art, and that knowledge of the work’s more intrinsically material aspects can help to provide new elements for assessment also in art historical and stylistic terms, as well as in terms of its condition.
The list of analyses generically defined as “non-invasive” – those examinations that do not require the removal of sample material to provide a result – has expanded in recent years thanks also to the development of science and technology expressly targeting cultural heritage issues. Thus it is no longer simply a matter of optoelectronic examinations or imaging but also of highly complex and sophisticated examination techniques, such as those that enable technicians to analyse the elements of the materials making up the work of art in their various forms of chemical and physical aggregation.
The instrumentation for these techniques, which has become largely “movable”, makes their use even more beneficial. These days, it is around them that a fully-fledged research laboratory is built, in which it is possible to use several different analytical methods to achieve a fully-fledged “integrated analysis”. Non-invasive examinations must be chosen and performed in a situation of reciprocity and contextualisation, in order to deepen the analysis in those areas containing significant elements representative of the artistic technique.
Moreover, imaging examinations provide an overall view of the work of art on multiple levels of technical interpretation. It is only after this initial phase – the examination of the analytical results of imaging and the implementation of the connections between this data and the data from the autopsic technical analysis of the work – that one can move on to deeper research, proceeding to explore micro-areas and specific points, thanks to the localisation of problems, selected on the basis of the extent to which they represent essential artistic technique or conservation issues.
The following diagnostic techniques will be explored during the course:
- documentation (nodal or multishot) in various forms of lighting: diffused light, raking light, ultraviolet fluorescence
- imaging with invisible electromagentic waves: ultraviolet fluorescence, infrared reflectography, infrared false colour processing
- use of X-ray: X-ray, computerised axial tomography (CAT, XRF by points and XRF by area)
Enrolment deadline: 24 May 2025
The course will be held if and when the minimum number of participants is reached
An attendance certificate will be issued
