Ancient Paintings Research Articles

Increased NIR photoluminescence of Egyptian blue via matrix effect optimization

The exceptionally high NIR photoluminescence of the ancient pigment Egyptian blue is due to its very stable phase cuprorivaite (CaCuSi4O10). This compound has recently attracted significant attention, leading to numerous applications for sensors, luminescent solar concentrators, energy-saving, and biomedicine. Here we report an innovative manufacturing process for producing high-grade cuprorivaite, characterized by fine crystal grains and a significantly increased NIR photoluminescence emission. The unprecedented ultra-high NIR emission (quantum yield ΦEM ≈ 30 %) is almost three times higher than the best one reported so far. This is an important turning point for the extension of applications of cuprorivaite to new sectors and can greatly boost its exploitation. The new high-efficiency cuprorivaite is obtained by solid-state synthesis, using silica nanoparticles as a starting material and avoiding fluxing agents. No doping with rare-earths or other elements has been employed, making synthesis straightforward and sustainable. The material obtained has been fully characterized in terms of crystalline, morphological, and optical properties and compared to cuprorivaite obtained through traditional melt-flux synthesis. The main difference observed is that the tiny crystals obtained through the new synthesis method are practically devoid of the glassy phase, rich in copper and impurities, that is instead largely present in Egyptian Blue pigment synthesized with traditional melt-flux synthesis. We speculate that this glassy phase is responsible for the partial suppression of the intrinsic photoluminescence of cuprorivaite, demonstrating how limiting the glassy phase can increase the external quantum efficiency of Egyptian blue.

UNVEILING MUGHAL MINIATURES: TREASURES OF PUDUCHERRY'S ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTRÊME-ORIENT

Puducherry, one of India's storied historic cities, is the custodian of a vast collection of ancient paintings, miniatures, sculptures, historical artifacts and more. These treasures are meticulously preserved within government offices, museums, art galleries and hotels. This research project narrows its focus to a select group of Mughal period miniatures drawn from this rich and diverse cultural reservoir.The Ecole Francaise d'Extrême-Orient, a renowned French research institute, is located on Rue Dumas Street in Puducherry and is fully dedicated to the thorough investigation of Indian culture, history and society. The institution was established in Puducherry in 1950 and it houses paintings, miniatures, sculptures and antiques in its basement. It is believed to contain about 35 priceless paintings. This amazing collection includes a wide range of artistic genres and materials, from paper and ivory to wooden frames, metal plates and even terracotta surfaces. Among these artworks, the most notable are the ivory miniatures dating back to the Mughal period."The researcher's objective is to examine five specific portraits featuring three-quarter busts of women and love scenes within these ivory Mughal miniature paintings. These artworks offer a concise yet profound glimpse into the rich tapestry of Indian culture and heritage. The depiction of women's attire showcases the diversity and elegance inherent in Indian fashion, while the portrayal of love scenes celebrates the cultural significance of romance and emotional connections, thus emphasizing India's deep-rooted cultural traditions. The meticulous detailing within these works underscores the exceptional artistry of Indian artisans, while the expressions and postures of the depicted characters provide valuable insights into the societal norms and values of the era. In essence, these miniature paintings encapsulate the multifaceted essence of Indian heritage."Employing a rigorous combination of fieldwork and historical research methodologies, this research endeavor seeks to illuminate the origins, historical contexts, aesthetic attributes, stylistic intricacies and technical craftsmanship inherent in these Mughal era miniatures. Additionally, this study aspires to unveil the intricate tradition, dynamic evolution and profound cultural significance embodied by this cherished art form.

A multi-analytical approach to identify ancient pigments used in pottery towers excavated from the Han Dynasty tombs

In 2013, several tombs were discovered and excavated in Southeastern Beijing, China, yielding various burial products. Among these were pottery towers, a representative artifact of the Han Dynasty rarely found in the area. Many studies on architectural aspects, such as construction type and construction situation, have been conducted based on the excavated pottery towers, but only a few have examined their raw materials or pigments. In this study, black, white, and red pigments were identified as carbon black, calcite, and cinnabar, respectively, through a multi-analysis approach. The manufacturing method of the pigment was established based on the crystal form and particle size of the pigment, by factoring in the pigment characteristics, which cannot be distinguished by component analysis and crystal structure analysis. We recommend that a continuous database be prepared and used in the future, not only for an interpretation of ancient pigments but also to identify the factors to be considered (physical characteristics, such as pigment particle size among others) when estimating the manufacturing process and conservation treatment.

Poetry4painting: Diversified poetry generation for large-size ancient paintings based on data augmentation

Chinese painting poetry is an extraordinary art form, which not only describes the painting contexts but also grasps the sentiment of the painters. In this paper, we propose an automatic poetry generation method Poetry4painting, which enhances the poetry diversity for large-size ancient paintings. The basic framework is based on multiple modern sentences, that are first captioned from the ancient painting and then used to generate a poem using CNN and LSTM. To solve the repeatability issue of this framework, four kinds of data augmentation are employed during online processing, including quantity, shape, surrounding, and object augmentation. In offline training, data augmentation is also used to create an image caption dataset with over 1500 painting images and 7500 captions. Through ablation studies, evaluations of poetry qualities and diversities, and comparisons with other methods, we demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.

A Tailor-Made, Mirror-Based Infrared Scanner for the Reflectography of Paintings: Development, Features, and Applications.

Since infrared reflectography was first applied in the 1960s to visualize the underdrawings of ancient paintings, several devices and scanning techniques were successfully proposed both as prototypes and commercial instruments. In fact, because of the sensors' small dimension, typically ranging from 0.1 to 0.3 megapixels, scanning is always required. Point, line, and image scanners are all viable options to obtain an infrared image of the painting with adequate spatial resolution. This paper presents a newly developed, tailormade scanning system based on an InGaAs camera equipped with a catadioptric long-focus lens in a fixed position, enabling all movements to occur by means of a rotating mirror and precision step motors. Given the specific design of this system, as the mirror rotates, refocus of the lens is necessary and it is made possible by an autofocus system involving a laser distance meter and a motorized lens. The system proved to be lightweight, low cost, easily portable, and suitable for the examination of large-scale painting surfaces by providing high-resolution reflectograms. Furthermore, high-resolution images at different wavelengths can be obtained using band-pass filters. The in-situ analysis of a 16th-century panel painting is also discussed as a representative case study to demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of the system described herein.

Convergent evolutionary shifts in rhodopsin retinal release explain shared opsin repertoires in monotremes and crocodilians.

The visual ecology of early mammals remains poorly resolved. Studies of ancestral photopigments suggest an ancient transition from nocturnal to more crepuscular conditions. By contrast, the phenotypic shifts following the split of monotremes and therians-which lost their SWS1 and SWS2 opsins, respectively-are less clear. To address this, we obtained new phenotypic data on the photopigments of extant and ancestral monotremes. We then generated functional data for another vertebrate group that shares the same photopigment repertoire as monotremes: the crocodilians. By characterizing resurrected ancient pigments, we show that the ancestral monotreme underwent a dramatic acceleration in its rhodopsin retinal release rate. Moreover, this change was likely mediated by three residue replacements, two of which also arose on the ancestral branch of crocodilians, which exhibit similarly accelerated retinal release. Despite this parallelism in retinal release, we detected minimal to moderate changes in the spectral tuning of cone visual pigments in these groups. Our results imply that ancestral forms of monotremes and crocodilians independently underwent niche expansion to encompass quickly changing light conditions. This scenario-which accords with reported crepuscular activity in extant monotremes-may help account for their loss of the ultraviolet-sensitive SWS1 pigment but retention of the blue-sensitive SWS2.

В поисках утраченной традиции: к истории церковной живописи 1840-х - первой половины 1850-х гг.

The last decade of the reign of Nicholas I (1845 - 1855) was the time when the projects of renewal of church paintings in Russia appeared. Public discussion of the problems of the tradition of the Russian art started with the publication in 1845 of a brochure "On Icon-paintings" by the Ostrog bishop Anatoly, who wasn't, however, a zealous adherent to the traditional icon-paintings, his "theory" of icon-paintings tending towards neoclassicism. In difference from the Right Reverend Anatoly's approach in his brochure, the Rev'd Grigoriy Debolsky argued for the inseparable connection between the national spirit (narodnost') of the church paintings and the tradition of icon-painting in an article published in the same year. Russian Academic school did not respond to the new attitudes in society: propelled by the Emperor, this school acknowledged the tradition in symbolic terms only - in the Byzantinine golden impressions in the paintings in St Isaac's Cathedral. On the whole, the ensemble of these paintings promised to become a brilliant legacy of Bologna academism. 1848, the year of a wave of revolutions in Europe that were perceived as a direct threat to the Empire, opened a period of Nicholas's reign marked, on the other hand, by the intensification of censorship, and, on the other hand, by the two projects of renewal of national church art: those by Duke G.G. Gagarin and by I.P. Sakharov, an archaeologist. The first project, which had at its base the idea, taken from French artists, of christianising ancient art, was an attempt to adapt the Byzantine tradition to the framework of the academic artistic paradigm. Sakharov's project, on the contrary, presupposed complete rejection of this academic paradigm and going back to the icon-paintings that were not yet "spoiled" by Western influences. On the eve of the Crimean war the government made an attempt to expand the national tradition by including in it the ancient paintings from the Mount Athos, in particular, the wall-paintings by Panselinos, which, as A.N. Mouravyov claimed, "are on a par with the works by Rafael and Michelangelo in colouration and modest comportment of the figures". In the new era, marked by the Great Reform of Alexander II, the attempts at a renewal of church paintings that flourished in Nicholas's times, become, for the most part, a thing of the past.

Determination of Peach Gum in Ancient Chinese Paintings by Biotin–Streptavidin-Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay

ABSTRACT Peach gum was the most common and widely used exudate gum in ancient China. In this study, polyclonal antibodies to peach gum were prepared using the protein of peach gum as the antigen. The polyclonal antibodies were used to identify peach gum with high sensitivity and specificity by biotin–streptavidin-enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (BA-ELISA). The binders used in the ancient paintings of the Forbidden City and the Dazu Rock Carvings were detected by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The results showed that the binders of the Dazu Rock Carvings were diverse, including collagen, ovalbumin, casein, peach gum, and lacquer, and that collagen and peach gum coexisted in most samples of the Forbidden City. This study demonstrates ELISA's high efficiency in analyzing binders in ancient paintings.

Nobility and art: the philosophy of ancient painting

The article presents the cultural genesis of the nobility society through the synthesis of the military adventure of men and the playing leisure of women into a common courtly culture In the courtly culture of court society, a system of regulation of relations arises with an orientation to an excellent act and, accordingly, with the requirement to see yourself from the outside, show yourself from the best side. As a result, a phenomenon arises that can be called pictorial Pictorial communication precedes the emergence of the visual arts, which sometimes arise on a random occasion. Ancient painting was no exception. The turn to luxury after the Greco-Persian wars initiated the mural by analogy with the trellis art of the Persians. The content of ancient painting in the form of wall painting and vase painting was the culture of communication that Hegel in his lectures on aesthetics called the color of man and which by the 19th century began to disappear.

Method of Hidden Strip Information Extraction from Hyperspectral Images of Ancient Paintings

Method of Hidden Strip Information Extraction from Hyperspectral Images of Ancient Paintings

Новые материалы к биографии Б. Н. Засыпкина

This article continues the author’s series of publications on the history of organization and participants of the studies in Eastern culture in the Crimea in the mid-1920s. A page of the expeditionary activities of the team of the Central State Restoration Workshops in the Crimea is revealed. This work was a part of large-scale archaeological and ethnographic expedition for the study of the Crimean Tatar monuments. It was commissioned and funded by the Crimean ASSR and carried out by researchers from the academic centres of the USSR. The article has analysed the participation of Boris Nikolaevich Zasypkin (1891–1955), a well-known restorer and the organizer of the archaeological monument protection in different regions of the USSR, in the study of the Crimean cultural heritage. It has introduced into the scholarship previously not known documents from the collections of the Central State Restoration Workshops now residing in the Moscow Central State Archives. These materials shed light on new aspects of the architect-restorer B. N. Zasypkin’s works in the Crimea in 1926 and 1927. The texts of Zasypkin’s reports on his works on the peninsula in 1926 are supplied. Informative but little-known letters of P. I. Chepurina, the head of Yevpatoria Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum, and K. E. Grinevich, the director of the State Museum of Tauric Chersonese, to B. N. Zasypkin uncover tough personal communications of the researchers of the Crimea and Zasypkin’s role in the said process. Zasypkin’s activities for the preservation of the museum in Yevpatoria has been demonstrated. He arranged the intercession of the museum existence and preservation of its storage from the Head of the Museum section of the Glavnauka (Supreme Administration of Scientific, Scientific-Artistic, and Museum Establishments) at the People’s Commissariat for Education of the RSFSR N. I. Sedova, the Head of the Glavnauka F. N. Petrov, and the Chair of the State Academy for the History of Material Culture N. Ia. Marr. The Central State Restoration Workshops’ expedition under the supervision of I. E. Grabar to the peninsula has been reconstructed. It included the head of the Commission for the Preservation and Discovery of Ancient Paintings in Russia and the art historian A. I. Anisimov, the restorer G. O. Chirikov, and the photographer A. V. Liadov. The 1927 expedition was aimed at the inspection of architectural monuments where paintings survived and the development of necessary measures to protect and maintain these architectural sites. Zasypkin’s work for the recording of Chersonese monuments has been shown.

An Ancient Chinese Painting Restoration Method Based on Improved Generative Adversarial Network

During the long-term preservation process of ancient Chinese paintings, there are various degrees of damage. Manual repair methods are inefficient, professional, and prone to secondary damage. Aiming at the above problems, a UGAN ancient painting restoration model based on an improved Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is proposed. The model uses GAN as the overall framework. The generator in the framework adopts a U-shaped network (U-Net), and adds a dilated convolution-gated residual block (DCGR-Block) in the middle, which enhances the model’s ability to extract the shallow and deep feature information of the image. In the experiment, the test results are compared with the current mainstream methods. The comparison results show that when repairing the overall deletion, the peak signal-to-noise ratio (SPNR) and structural similarity (SSIM) of UGAN are improved by 8.14% and 4.79% on average compared with the global and local consistency image inpainting (GLCIC). When the rate is higher, the performance of the network model in this paper is also better than that of similar mainstream algorithms.

Strange Meeting at Salihiyeh: Who Discovered (or Encountered, or Identified, or Invented) Dura-Europos, and When?

The centenary of the establishment of the Department of Classics at the University of Kraków coincides with that of the beginnings of the study of the ‘Pompeii of the Syrian Desert.’In spring 1920, British Indian soldiers digging in the ruins known as Salihiyeh overlooking the Euphrates accidentally revealed ancient paintings. Recorded by archaeologist James Henry Breasted, these discoveries would soon lead to further excavations by Franz Cumont (1922–1923), and eventually to the great Yale-French Academy expedition under Mikhail Rostovtzeff (1928–1937). By then the site was famous as ‘Dura-Europos,’giving us remarkable insights into Hellenistic Greek, Parthian, Roman, early Christian and Jewish life in the Middle East. Not the least of the discoveries related to the soldiers of Dura’s Roman garrison. This paper traces the history of the revelation—and, in part, invention—of Dura-Europos in the 1920s. It is a story of eminent scholars, but also of others who actually revealed the evidence: soldiers, both officers and men, of the armies of the British and French empires which dominated the region at the time. Today, at a time of ‘decolonisation’of scholarship, the very formulation ‘Dura-Europos’itself is a subject of contention.

Research on Chinese traditional culture development art innovation design and development system

Seeking the integration and innovation of traditional culture and modern technology, through the digital innovation and design research of traditional Chinese culture, the traditional Chinese ancient painting art and contemporary digital technology will go from parallel to active intersection and construct a new era from traditional Chinese culture: expressive form and symbol novelty. While realizing the creative concept design of contemporary Chinese traditional culture, the establishment of an infrared interactive projection system has been completed, and innovations have been made to meet the interactive projection requirements of traditional Chinese traditional culture for complicated technologies such as separation of pen touch points from background images and target tracking of pen touch points, with the breakthrough. They combined interactive projection technology with traditional Chinese culture for re-creation and re-expression, breaking through the inertial cognition of traditional Chinese culture with vision as the main body, emphasizing the correlation between hearing and traditional Chinese culture, and realizing conceptual innovation by designers and architectural designers. Technical personnel cooperate and communicate across borders and finally complete the multi-sensory new experience of digital art expression, providing a new way for digital innovation of traditional art.

Prakratik Manviya Pravratti,Rangmay Srashti evam kalatamak samanjasyta maen varn samrenshad Bodh

The tradition of using color in Indian painting has been going on since ancient painting styles. These include Ajanta, Pala, Apabhransh, Mughal, Rajasthani and Pahari styles. In which lines and letters have been used in a very realistic manner and the environment of the picture has been made beautiful, an attempt has also been made to create a three-dimensional effect from the lines. In the journey from Ajanta to Pahari miniature painting, there has been a lot of innovation and development in the varna tradition

The Modernity of Ancient Pigments: A Historical Approach

Naturally occurring and synthetic ancient pigments have a history of use spanning thousands of years. Curiously, some of their newly discovered properties make them excellent candidates for semiconductors, anticounterfeiting agents and so much more. In this paper, we will review their ancient roots in art and modern emergence as 21st century workhorses. You can never judge a pigment by its color alone!

UV-Excited Fluorescence as a Basis for the In-Situ Identification of Natural Binders in Historical Painting: A Critical Study on Model Samples

The fluorescence emission by aged organic binders used in painting is a well-known phenomenon. Several literature studies were devoted to its investigation, both on pure binders and on their mixtures with some pigments. Nevertheless, a systematic study about the real possibility of exploiting such a phenomenon for the non-invasive identification of binders in ancient paintings is still lacking. In the present work, a prototype portable fluorimeter was used to analyze a significant number of model painting samples containing different binders (drying oils, egg yolk, milk, animal glue, and gum Arabic) mixed with various pigments having different hues. The model samples were naturally aged in a period ranging from fifteen to one year. The effects on the spectral pattern due to the different binders, the recipes used to prepare them, and the pigments mixed with them were examined. The fluorescence spectra were corrected for the absorption of the emitted radiation due to the pigments. Finally, the corrected spectra were treated by principal component analysis to determine if the possibility of distinguishing at least the most fluorescent and common binders, i.e., drying oils and egg, existed. It was shown that, even if the technique cannot be effectively applied in the case of mixed or superimposed binders, it allows to put forward at least a preliminary hypothesis when pure binders are used.

Evaluation of hydrophilicity and moisture adsorption characteristics of inorganic mineral pigments to sustain ancient paintings

ObjectivesInorganic mineral pigments were widely used in ancient painted artworks, and their adsorption characteristic of water vapor in the environment is one of the reasons affecting the deterioration process of paintings under environmental humidity. This paper investigates the characteristics and mechanism of the water vapor adsorption process of inorganic mineral pigments in order to guide the conservation of ancient painting artworks. Material and methodsThe contact angle and isothermal hygroscopic curves of common inorganic mineral pigments were measured, as well as the nanoscale pore characteristics of mineral pigments and the effect of gelatin on the hygroscopic process of mineral pigments. The hydrophilic and hygroscopic properties of different mineral pigments were analyzed and compared. ResultsEarthen red and Kaolinite have been the strongesthygroscopic minerals, and their adsorption processes include adsorption on the particle surface and also capillary condensation. The hygroscopicity of mineral pigments containing iron oxide and carbonate was moderate, with moisture adsorption occurringmainly on the particle surface, whereas the other mineral pigments had little hygroscopicity. Furthermore, the gelatin used to mix mineral pigments has the ability to invade the nanoscale pores of the pigments and modify the pigments' watervapor adsorption process. ConclusionThe results of the study can provide a theoretical basis for revealing the deterioration process of ancient painting artworks under the influence of the climatic environment, and can be useful in proposing conservation measures for painted artworks.

Дослідження християнського Сходу в науковій спадщині єпископа Порфирія (Успенського)

The study is devoted to the scientific heritage of Bishop Porphyry (Uspensky) (1804–1885), who found a significant number of written and material sources on church history in the Christian East. The bishop made three trips to the East during 1843–1846, 1848–1854 and 1865–1877. The main sources for this article were published documents, primarily the epistolary heritage of Porphyry, his publications in periodicals and in separate editions. Based on them, it was found that the bishop’s scientific activity in the East can be divided into three interrelated areas. The first was the description of ancient church buildings and monasteries, the second was the study of manuscripts found in monastery libraries, and the third was the study of early Christian painting. Porphyry visited a large number of monasteries, churches and other religious places in Constantinople, Jerusalem and around it, in Palestine, Athos and Sinai. For most of them, he compiled descriptions, drawings, revealed architectural features. As a result of his work in the libraries of the Sinai Monastery, the Holy Sepulcher Monastery in Jerusalem and the Jerusalem Patriarchate, the bishop found more than a thousand different church documents and manuscripts. Among them, the most controversial was the Sinai Code of Scripture. In studying ancient manuscripts and historical events, Porphyry was an uncompromising critic of the unverified facts that took place in the Christian history of the East. The manuscripts of the conversations of Patriarch Photius of Constantinople, edited by Porphyry, contain important information about the campaigns of Prince Askold of Kyiv, which is rather fragmentary in sources of domestic origin. Exploring ancient paintings, Porphyry noted that there were few such monuments in the East, and those that have survived have been carefully copied and described. In addition, the bishop made a comparative analysis of the pictorial style of the most important ancient icons. The scientific heritage of Porphyry (Uspensky) was a significant contribution to the study of the history of the Christian East.

Computer-Aided Virtual Restoration of Frescoes Based on Intelligent Generation of Line Drawings

Dunhuang frescoes are one of China’s precious historical and cultural heritages, but this treasure trove of human art has become very fragile due to natural weathering damage and the threat of major natural disasters. Therefore, the preservation of Dunhuang murals has become an urgent task. Digital fresco conservation and restoration work can preserve fresco information permanently, and can use computers to virtually repair frescoes, assist in fresco conservation, assist in fresco copying, virtually evolve the fresco disease process, and virtually display fresco realism. Digital fresco conservation and restoration provides sufficient scientific basis and testing environment for the physical conservation and restoration process of frescoes, and minimizes the danger of conservation work. This paper presents a new approach to digital conservation and virtual restoration of frescoes. Based on research by Dunhuang artists on the mural restoration process, research on pigment composition, knowledge accumulated by the artists’ experience, and some of the better-preserved murals, digital image processing, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and other technologies are synthesized to achieve the virtual restoration of murals. Aiming at the current situation of Dunhuang mural restoration, combined with the actual painting process, this paper puts forward a set of computer-aided mural restoration solution based on intelligent generation of line graph. It can be well applied to the actual restoration work. It is a new attempt of computer-aided restoration of ancient paintings.