Hortus Medicus Et Philosophicus : In Quo Plurimarum Stirpium Breues Descriptiones, Novae Icones ... continentur / Autore Ioachimo Camerario, Reipub. Norimbrtg, Medico D.

This chapter explores the methods and materials of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers, the painting now in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Comprehensive physical and chemical investigations were performed using a range of non-invasive, in situ techniques combined with sample analysis. The results help to elucidate different stages of the artist’s working process, from making the canvas support, to the first charcoal sketch, the palette used, mixing and application of colour, paint texture and brushwork, as well as a wooden strip extension added late in the painting process. Comparisons are made with Van Gogh’s first painting of Sunflowers against a yellow background, now at the National Gallery in London

The beam and detector of the NA62 experiment at CERN

NA62 is a fixed-target experiment at the CERN SPS dedicated to measurements of rare kaon decays. Such measurements, like the branching fraction of the K+ → π+ ν bar nu decay, have the potential to bring significant insights into new physics processes when comparison is made with precise theoretical predictions. For this purpose, innovative techniques have been developed, in particular, in the domain of low-mass tracking devices. Detector construction spanned several years from 2009 to 2014. The collaboration started detector commissioning in 2014 and will collect data until the end of 2018. The beam line and detector components are described together with their early performance obtained from 2014 and 2015 data

The Colours of Indigenous Memory: Non-invasive Analyses of Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican Codices

The article discusses the results and cultural-historical implications of a set of non-destructive chemical analyses recently carried out on some of the few extant pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican painted manuscripts. Such analyses, the first of their kind ever carried out on pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican codices, provide fresh and new information regarding the painting materials and techniques used by the ancient painters. The comparative perspective adopted in the discussion allows a first understanding of various indigenous technological traditions, whose detailed study has a great potential in terms of deepening our knowledge of the intellectual history of ancient Mesoamerica

After the Fact: Evaluating our Interdisciplinary Study of Mondrian's Victory Boogie Woogie

This chapter presents an overview of the interdisciplinary research project on Victory Boogie Woogie, Piet Mondrian's final painting that remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1944. The authors also critically review their own project and reflect on its achievements and limitations

Silver and copper nanoclusters in the lustre decoration of italian renaissance pottery: an EXAFS study

Lustre is one of the most important decorative techniques of the Medieval and Renaissance pottery of the Mediterranean basin, capable of producing brilliant metallic, reflections and iridescence. Following the recent finding that the colour of lustre decorations is mainly determined by copper and silver nanoclusters dispersed in the glaze layer, the local environment of copper and silver atoms has been studied by extended Xray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) spectroscopy on original samples of gold and red lustre. It has been found that, in gold lustre, whose colour is attributed mainly to the silver nanocluster dispersion, silver is only partially present in the metallic form and copper is almost completely oxidised. In the red lustre, whose colour is attributed mainly to the copper nanocluster dispersion, only a fraction of copper is present in the metallic form. EXAFS measurements on red lustre, carried out in the total electron yield mode to probe only the first 150 nm of the glaze layer, indicated that in some cases lustre nanoclusters may be confined in a very thin layer close to the surface