ICONS CONSERVATION AND PIGMENTS IDENTIFICATION OF THE SACRED ICONS PAINTER ANTONIOS AGORASTOS

Abstract

The sacred icon painter Antonios Agorastos became known after the recording of his inscribed icons in Skopelos by Pavlos Lazaridis, covering a period of 30 years 1667-1703. The signed icons that we studied in Tyrnavos are the two icons of the Virgin Mary and Christ in the iconostasis of the church of Saint Anargyros on either side of the Beautiful Gate. The aim of the research is the study of the pigments of the hagiographer and the evaluation of other nonsigned icons. In a golden background, the Virgin Mary is depicted enthroned in the form of the Infant. She is depicted sitting frontally holding Christ in front of her. At the bottom right is an inscription with the painter's name, by the hand of Antonios sub deacon Agorastos Kritos (1668). Also, in a golden background, Jesus Christ is depicted enthroned in the type of Pantocrator. With his right hand he blesses and with his left he holds an open evangelist painting of holy icons. For the measurements of the pigments in the icons, the following techniques were used: a) Raman spectroscopy Thunder Optics - Gem Raman System with 532nm laser excitation, while before identification, the spectra were subjected to a procedure such as baseline correction, Savitzky - Golay smoothing - normalization and b) the XRF spectrometer Niton XLp 818 technique with an excitation source of 241 Αm. Analysis of Raman and XRF spectra was performed with the help of Spectragryph software. The identification of pigments using the two complementary techniques revealed the use of a variety of inorganic pigments such as lead white, copper green (verdigris), copper blue (azurite), for yellow (realgar), iron ochres (red and yellow) and cinnabar for the red colour.