Visualizing the 17th century underpainting in Portrait of an Old Man by Rembrandt van Rijn using synchrotron-based scann
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Visualizing the 17th century underpainting in Portrait of an Old Man by Rembrandt van Rijn using synchrotron-based scanning macro-XRF Matthias Alfeld · D. Peter Siddons · Koen Janssens · Joris Dik · Arthur Woll · Robin Kirkham · Ernst van de Wetering
Received: 21 July 2012 / Accepted: 30 November 2012 / Published online: 15 December 2012 © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
Abstract In 17th century Old Master Paintings, the underpainting generally refers to the first sketch of a composition. The underpainting is applied to a prepared ground using a monochrome, brown oil paint to roughly indicate light, shade and contours. So far, methods to visualize the underpainting—other than in localized cross-sections— have been very limited. Neither infrared reflectography nor neutron induced autoradiography have proven to be practical, adequate visualization tools. Thus, although of fundamental interest in the understanding of a painting’s genesis, M. Alfeld () · K. Janssens Department of Chemistry, University of Antwerp, Groenenborgerlaan 171, Antwerpen 2020, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] Fax: +32-0-32653233 K. Janssens e-mail: [email protected] D.P. Siddons National Synchrotron Light Source, Brookhaven National Laboratory, 75 Brookhaven Avenue, Upton, NY 11973-5000, USA J. Dik Delft University of Technology, Department of Materials Science, Mekelweg 2, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands A. Woll Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA R. Kirkham CSIRO, Materials Science and Engineering, Bayview Avenue, Clayton, VIC 3168, Australia E. van de Wetering Rembrandt Research Project, c/o Kunsthistorisch Instituut, Herengracht 286, 1016 BX Amsterdam, The Netherlands
the underpainting has virtually escaped all imaging efforts. In this contribution we will show that 17th century underpainting may consist of a highly heterogeneous mixture of pigments, including copper pigments. We suggest that this brown pigment mixture is actually the recycled left-over of a palette scraping. With copper as the heaviest exclusive elemental component, we will hence show in a case study on a Portrait of an Old Man attributed to Rembrandt van Rijn how scanning macro-XRF can be used to efficiently visualize the underpainting below the surface painting and how this information can contribute to the discussion of the painting’s authenticity.
1 Introduction The creation of a painting conventionally starts with a sketch that transfers the artist’s initial idea on the prepared canvas. In 16th century painting the first sketch was executed as an underdrawing, in that the contours of figures and objects were drawn, often with charcoal or water-based black paint, on a white preparation layer. This practice was abandoned towards the end of the 16th century. Artists started to use coloured grounds, on which the initial modeling was carried out in a monochrome brown paint, the so-called underpainting, by dead coloring areas on the canvas which defined the main forms and principal shadows of the artwork to
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