Strange places to find a chromatographer - Part VI: Art gallery
>> May 7, 2011
No, we are not the artists. At least, not yet.
Long time ago I met a chemist teaching conservation techniques at an art school. I was amused by the chemistry background contained at Incognito, and wondered what in that movie was real.
Although not involved in chromatography yet, I started to notice how much analytical chemistry is applied to studies of works of art, or the forgery.
Maybe the most famous case is from Hans van Meegeren, who is considered the master of forgery. van Meegeren developed a number of techniques to overcome the natural ageing of paintings.
He was arrested in 1945 and sentenced to a year in prison, but had a heart attack and died before.
In paintings the pigment are holded by the binders which can be proteins or oils, Ok but where's chromatography? well, van Meegeren used a Phenol-Formaldehyde resin to simulate the old binders, but this didn't exist 300 years ago. however only in 1975 that technology was abble to track back what kind of binder he had used using GC and pyrolisis to break down the monomers and analyse the result by chromatography.
Today, the research for the binders is well stablished, and discover what the artist used is just a matter of sample prepation.
Interesting reading:
Characterisation of proteinaceous binders and drying oils by GC-MS, Journal of Chromatography A, 846 (1999) 113–124
Identification of lipid binders in paintings by gas chromatography, Journal of Chromatography A, 922 (2001) 385–390
