THE 17th-century Flemish oil painter David Teniers hit upon a cunning plan to overcome the difficulty of capturing the metallic highlights in a collection of armour. He took a painting of armour by his talented brother-in-law Jan Brueghel, fixed boards around it, and created his own painting 鈥� The Armourer鈥檚 Shop (right) 鈥� around it.
At least that鈥檚 what Jennifer Mass, a researcher in painting chemistry at the Winterthur Museum in Wilmington, Delaware, thinks. She is part of a team that has probed the painting鈥檚 chemistry in three dimensions for the first time.
Suspicions were aroused about the painting, which is owned by the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, when conservator Noelle Ocon noticed in 2001 that the lower left corner was painted on a different panel, and possibly by a different artist. To prove it, she needed to show that the chemistry of the 鈥渋mprimatura鈥� 鈥� the base layer of paint artists use to give a uniform background 鈥� varies in that section.
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Each chemical element responds to X-rays by emitting different frequencies of fluorescence, but simply focusing X-rays onto a particular point on the painting doesn鈥檛 provide the required information. 鈥淵ou can tell which elements are present, but not at what depth,鈥� Mass says.
To separate the fluorescence of the imprimatura from the signal produced by other paint, the team used polycapillary optics 鈥� lenses that focus X-rays so that only those reflecting at a specific angle will be detected. They repeatedly scanned the painting with powerful X-rays at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source in Ithaca, New York, setting the optics to a different detection angle each time. This allowed the team to work out the chemistry at different depths, because the angle of fluorescence depends on the depth of the paint.
Under the armour they found that at imprimatura depth the chemistry differed from the rest of the painting, indicating that the panel was painted by a different person. 鈥淭hey both used lead and copper-based paints in their imprimatura, but only Teniers used iron-based paint,鈥� Mass says.
鈥淭he team is certain that Teniers appropriated Brueghel鈥檚 work鈥�
Taking into account the similarity that the panel has to Brueghel鈥檚 other paintings, the team is certain it is his work that Teniers appropriated. Mass says that鈥檚 because the Teniers armour painting wasn鈥檛 up to scratch. Ocon is reserving her judgement: 鈥淗e may have used the Brueghel panel simply because it was there,鈥� she says. The team will present their work at the Materials Research Society meeting in Boston on 28 November.
