Optical microscopy and SEM-EDS on wall-painting fragments from the St. George’s cathedral at Novgorod

Abstract

This paper presents the latest data obtained from the analyses of fragments of Russian-Byzantine wall paintings recovered from the architectural excavations carried out in the church of St. George in the Yuriev Princely Monastery built in 1119 at Veliky Novgorod, one of the oldest cities in Russia and UNESCO World site. In the last 7 years the archaeologists of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow excavated the 12th century layers and extracted a large number of wall-paintings fragments, which are extremely important for the reconstruction of the history of Novgorod and for the study of Russian-Byzantine art in general. The pigments employed for the paintings and the painting techniques, together with color layers, substrates and mortars, have been studied and analyzed in the last two years in the Laboratory of the Architectural Archaeology and Multidisciplinary Methods for Architectural Research, Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The employed analytical methods were optical microscopy (OM), X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometry (XRF) and Scanning Electron Microscope with Energy Dispersive Spectrometry (SEM-EDS). OM permits to distinguish the superficial painting method, the inclusions in the mortars, the intonaco and intonachino layers and the various substrates. XRF was applied for a first screening of the fragments and for the first pigment identification. The samples of painted mortar were then mounted in epoxy resin and polished for the analysis with SEM-EDS. The analytical data we possessed up to now indicate a very classical Byzantine technique with the use of expensive pigments such as lazurite and cinnabar, but also green earth, various types of ochres and mixtures of pigments. Special care was taken for the identification of the substrates.