Friday, August 5, 2016

Clarín.com – How XRF allowed to see the hidden box Degas works

The discovery of a hidden portrait under a famous painting by French impressionist Edgar Degas helped solve a mystery that had been kept alive for decades in the art world.

View also: With X-rays, managed to solve a mystery in the art world

But to get to that finding, it was necessary to wait for technological advances permit. It was so thanks to an advanced technique, Australian scientists were able to find hidden under the oil painting “Portrait of a Woman” of 1880, showing the portrait of another woman.

To find the portrait occult, the researchers turned to the X-ray fluorescence (XRF, for its acronym in English), which has a synchrotron, or a small particle accelerator that fails to detect metals in the pigments. This allows us to reconstruct each of the hidden layers similar to that they had before they were covered with the new work quality.

The Degas painting exhibited in Melbourne  (AP)

The synchrotron accelerates particles, whether electrons, protons or positrons, until it reaches a point that the excited material emits a light source (fluorescence X-rays), a beam formed by X and infrared radiation.

Australian scientists Synchotron, in charge of the work, spent 33 hours painting accurately scanning. Synchrotrons accelerate electrons at high speed, and the source of light produced is a million times brighter than the sun.

Before had already used the technique of XRF. He debuted in 2008, when it was used to give the portrait of a woman under the Patch of Grass Van Gogh. But they achieved improved XRF Australians is vastly superior. They were able to look each brushstroke of Degas

 the image shown by X-rays (AP)

” the advantages of synchrotron radiation are in their narrow bandwidth, high intensity and the possibility of changing the energy of the X-ray source, “explained the site elespañol.com Daryl Howard, one of the pioneers of this new technique. He continues: “These properties allow you to measure things that would otherwise be elusive with conventional methods,” as do each of the strokes

The work is part of the collection of the National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne. (Australia)

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