Technical peculiarities in Giovanni Santi’s paintings on canvas

Giovanni Santi (Colbordolo ca. 1439–Urbino 1494) was one of the most important painters active in Urbino (Marche region, Italy) during the last decades of the fifteenth century, where he was employed at the court of the celebrated Federico da Montefeltro. He is known mainly as the father of Raphael, but he had a remarkable production of paintings, especially on wood but also on canvas and on wall. This paper focuses on technical peculiarities related to Santi’s paintings on canvas, including some practices that have not yet been noted in relation to his panel paintings. In particular, two works painted on herringbone-weave linen canvases were investigated: Tobias and the Archangel Raphael and Saint Roch (both dated ca. 1490–94), in the collection of the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche. The results presented are a part of a large research project based on noninvasive and micro-invasive investigations carried out on twenty-eight works attributed to Giovanni Santi, only partially published in a recent exhibition catalog dedicated to the artist (Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, 2018). Black underdrawing, characterized by a thinly applied network of close hatching for some of the shadows, was observed and, regarding the different hues, a complex use of pigments. The binder detected is siccative oil, with the addition of a large amount of transparent glass particles, which would have been added both to give body to the pigment without using white fillers and to improve drying, a technique that Santi presumably learned from the Flemish painter Justus van Ghent (act. Urbino ca. 1473–1475) and something that he possibly transmitted to his son Raphael as a workshop practice. In fact, Giovanni Santi’s workshop survived his death

New Insight on Medieval Painting in Sicily: The Virgin Hodegetria Panel in Monreale Cathedral (Palermo, Italy)

: The Virgin Hodegetria, located in the Cathedral of Santa Maria Nuova in Monreale, near Palermo (Italy), probably dating the first half of the 13th century, is one of the earliest examples of medieval panel painting in Sicily. A diagnostic campaign was carried out on the panel aiming to identify the constituting materials and the executive technique, as well as to assess the state of conservation for supporting the methodological choice of the restoration intervention. Both non invasive (X-ray radiography, digital microscope, multispectral imaging, ED-X-ray fluorescence) and micro-invasive (polarised light microscopy, ESEM-EDX, ATR-FTIR spectroscopy and micro-Raman spectroscopy) analyses were performed. According to the results, the executive technique followed the 13th–14th-century Italian painting tradition. A complex structure was applied on the wooden support, consisting of a double layer of canvas and several ground layers of gypsum and glue based binder. The underdrawing was made by a brush using carbonaceous black pigment. The original palette includes red ochre, red lead, azurite, carbon black and bone black. During the several restorations, mercury-based red, indigo, smalt blue, orpiment and synthetic mars were used. The original silver leaf of the frame was covered with red tin-based lake and subsequently regilded with gold leaf. Proteinaceous and oil binders were also detecte