The importance of being little: MA-XRF on manuscripts on a Venetian island

The XRF scanning spectrometer developed in the framework of CHNet-INFN (Cultural Heritage Network - National Institute of Nuclear Physics), is specifically customised for cultural heritage applications, designed with a focus on having a lightweight scanner (weighing approximately 10 kg), easy to handle and thus easily transportable in two medium-sized boxes. The research presented here deals with the study of a set of choir books preserved in the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore on the homonymous island in Venice. Produced for the Abbey itself from the mid-15th century onwards, the manuscripts have never left the island, making the study of the materials of particular interest as they have undergone little or no modification over time. During their history in the Abbey, however, the volumes have been disassembled and reassembled in various ways, bringing complexity to the current cataloguing work. Thus, analytical investigations of the pigments and painting techniques might help identify the original arrangement of displaced leaves and provide evidence for the attribution of individual illuminations to certain artists. Thanks to its easy transportability, it was possible to take the scanner to the small island by means of the water-based Venetian public transport. Selected results are presented, derived from the high-quality MA-XRF maps obtained

Lenses in Renaissance Science

Lenses – curved pieces of glass that can focus light to create magnified images of objects – must be included among those essential and irreplaceable instruments whose use helped to view reality in an unprecedented way. For example, lenticular artifacts such as telescopes, microscopes, and eyeglasses, literally allowed to focus a new image of the world, up to persuade mankind on an optical basis that – as Shakespeare’s Hamlet said – “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Homocentrism

Lenses – curved pieces of glass that can focus light to create magnified images of objects – must be included among those essential and irreplaceable instruments whose use helped to view reality in an unprecedented way. For example, lenticular artifacts such as telescopes, microscopes, and eyeglasses, literally allowed to focus a new image of the world, up to persuade mankind on an optical basis that – as Shakespeare’s Hamlet said – “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Tools for the discovery of hyperaccumulator plant species and understanding their ecophysiology

Globally the discovery of hyperaccumulator plants has been hindered by systematic screening of plant species, and is highly biased towards Ni hyperaccumulators. This is mainly due to the existence of a reagent paper test that is only specific to nickel (based on dimethylglyoxime) such that more than 400 of the approximately 500 known hyperaccumulators species are for Ni. New technical advances now permit massive screening of herbarium specimens using non-destructive, portable X-Ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy (XRF), an approach that has already led to the discovery of numerous hyperaccumulator species new to science. The elemental distribution in selected hyperaccumulator plant tissues can then be further studied using techniques such as desktop or synchrotron micro-XRF, nuclear microprobe (PIXE), scanning/transmission electron microscopy with energy-dispersive spectroscopy (SEM/TEM-EDS), secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) or laser ablation inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). The use of histochemical dyes combined with light microscopy further aids in the identification of anatomical and structural features of the studied plant tissues