Caput Mortuum Research Articles

Hematite colour revisited: Particle size and electronic transitions

Hematite has been used as a pigment since ancient times, due to its natural abundance and colour that ranges from vivid red to purple. Caput mortuum is a purple α-Fe2O3 whose colour has been ascribed as originating from particle size. In this work, submicrometric synthetic, natural and commercial hematites were investigated by diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS), scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDS) and Raman microscopy aiming to clarify the origin of the purple colour. From the results it was concluded that the purple colour is associated with crystallinity, that promotes a significant decrease in absorption below 500 nm and, simultaneously, an increase in the 6A1(6S) → 4T1(4G) d-d transition at ca. 880 nm. The behaviour of the ca. 880 nm band can be explained by the more extensive magnetic interaction between adjacent Fe3+ ions in crystalline samples but cannot explain the spectral behaviour in the green–blue region considering only the d-d transitions. A plausible explanation is that in the distorted FeO6 octahedra, both the Fe-O distances and the Fe-O-Fe angles area are affected, thus interfering in the low energy oxygen-to-iron charge transfer transition, whose tail span the 400 nm – 500 nm region and is more intense than the d-d transitions in hematite nanoparticles, nanofilms and defective (red) Fe2O3 samples. The decrease in the intensity of the charge transfer band as a consequence of the FeO6 octahedral distortion is yet to be confirmed by further experiments, but the experimental results clearly show that the purple colour of hematite is due to a decrease in optical absorption below 500 nm.

Kapadokya’daki Post-Bizans (XIX yüzyıl) Kilisesindeki Duvar Resimlerindeki Pigmentlerin Arkeometrik Teknikler ile Araştırılması

Cappadocia region, rock churches, monasteries, houses, underground settlements, valleys and historical and geological formations have unique beauty. The region, which is rich with its cultural assets belongs to Christian culture in Anatolia, is generally known with its rock churches, and is a subject to researches. The purpose of this study is; to understand the wall painting technology of the 19th century church, and to make a comparison with the wall painting materials of the rock churches. The study material is composed of pigments in the wall paintings of the Church of St. Theodoros Trion, which is from the 19th century, and located in Nevşehir. Scanning Electron Microscope and Energy Distributed Spectrometer (SEM-EDX), X-Ray Diffraction Spectrometry (XRD) and Fourier Transformed Infrared Spectrophotometer (FTIR) are used to determine material characterization of pigments. X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometer (XRF) analysis method was used in the analysis of the soil structure. As a result of analysis of the wall painting, it has been found that the ultramarine pigment is obtained from the lapis lazuli mineral and the covellite mineral of the covellite blue. In red, the red ochre and the caput mortuum pigment in purple color has been found. In the mineral of different pigment species, bauxite mineral belongs to the region have been detected. Green color, it has been determined that it is obtained from the glauconite and celadonite mineral in the region. According to the research carried out in the region in green color, it has been detected that only this pigment species has been used from the 6th century to the 19th century.

Paints of Old Believer Carved Icons of the Lower Pechora: Technical, Technological, Historical, and Archival Aspects of Study

This article considers the technical, technological, and archival aspects of the study of Old Believer carved works of art (icons and crosses) of the Lower Pechora, whose origin is associated with the Velikopozhensky Monastery on the Pizhma River (currently, Ust-Tsilma District of the Komi Republic). The reason for the study is the hypothesis about the local origin of the ochre used for painting the icons, as there are rich deposits in the vicinity of the village of Skitskaya (on the site of the former Velikopozhensky Skete). According to written sources, they were developed until the first quarter of the twentieth century. The article describes the methods of studying the composition of ochre samples from deposits in the vicinity of the village of Skitskaya, the colours of The Cross of Golgotha, a Velikopozhensky carved icon from the collection of the National Gallery of the Komi Republic (Syktyvkar). Also, the authors speak about the palette of F. O. Anshukov, a hereditary Old Believer spoon maker from the village of Skitskaya, research results, and their correlation with data from written sources. The study demonstrates that the white and other pigments of The Cross of Golgotha icon contain white lead. The red pigment is minium. The blue pigment corresponds to the composition of Prussian blue. Natural pigments (caput mortuum, ochre) are not used. In the spoon maker’s palette, red, brown, and blue pigments are mixed with lead white with an admixture of quartz, barite, and gypsum. Minium was used as a red pigment. The composition of the blue pigment corresponds to Prussian blue. The white paint in the palette is zinc white. The green paint was replaced with zinc white with an arsenic-containing pigment (Scheele’s green?). The brown paint contains iron oxides, which suggests the natural origin of the pigment (caput mortuum). The results of the research testify that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the inhabitants of the Velikopozhensky Skete and their descendants, masters of “Pyzhem painting” on wood, used mainly imported pigments of artificial origin.

The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany by Adrian Daub

Reviewed by: The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany by Adrian Daub Joseph D. O'Neil Adrian Daub. The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 247 pp. + index. Adrian Daub's comprehensive reimagining of German literary and cultural history is a worthy follow-up to his 2012 Uncivil Unions, as if the off-kilter marriages and other unions had gone on to spawn equally out-of-sync offspring. Like the earlier book, The Dynastic Imagination revises a mostly canonical literary history by focusing on a master figure, this time the idea of ancestry, descent, inheritance, and lineage, in order to produce a new story. This story is told in terms of the uncanny recurrence of dynastic figures of kinship in spite of the revolutionary and Romantic critique of dynasty and its putative replacement in the nineteenth century by the bourgeois nuclear family. In this context, dynasty becomes a critical tool to overcome bourgeois strictures and the confines of "nuclearity," the opposite pole to the dynastic. Over eight chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue, Daub charts the fate of dynastic figures of thought in works by the usual German and Austrian suspects, from Goethe and Hegel through Stifter to Freud and George. His study also includes English and French authors—Mary Shelley, Émile Zola, Marcel Proust—Schelling and Young Hegelians, and Richard Wagner plus his dynasty. Goethe, for example, charts a pattern of regression, failed development, and generations out of sync vis-à-vis the Romantic generation he largely outlived, at least in terms of their creative energies. The reading of Hegel in the context of German feminism with its shifting relationship to the dynastic imagination before and after 1848 is perhaps the book's most novel contribution, as it brings Bettina von Arnim into conversation with Louise Dittmar and Henriette Goldschmidt across the year of revolutions, mapping the fates of Hegelianism in unexpected ways. While these early chapters revise our understanding of what the figure of dynasty means and does in the prenational period, Daub's virtuosic reading of Wagner includes the Ring cycle, the Wagner family and their physiognomy, Wagner's essays, Parsifal, Schopenhauer's views on marriage, and Wagner's son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, without failing to mention the Wagnerian nose. The following chapter on naturalism displays the comparative approach, which is one of the real strengths of this book. While his treatment of Mary Shelley's The Last Man in chapter 3 is sandwiched between readings of Schelling [End Page 185] and Goethe (Faust II) with abundant injections of Hegel, chapter 6 is almost exclusively French, with a reading of several parts of the vast Rougon-Macquart cycle that situates Germinal and the other stories of the two intertwined families firmly in Daub's dynastic paradigm. A pleasantly surprising change on first reading, it is, upon reflection, hard to imagine how the book could have been written without it. A brief coda on Proust ends this chapter with an exclamation mark, the queering of the dynastic imagination in "a lineage that does not follow necessity but rather constitutes itself in and through breaks from what's necessary and probable," as will be the case in decadence and early modernism for Wilde, Mann, Wedekind, et al. Proust reemerges in the final chapter as an interlocutor for the queer poetics of dynasty in Stefan George and his forms of poetic family and legacy. As with the elective Schicksal Daub expounds and advocates in his reading of the Hungarian-Jewish psychoanalyst Léopold Szondi—the coda to a chapter on Freud and the awful C. G. Jung—the queer turn affirms the power of lineages and forms of kinship that are created and affirmed over against naturalized and nationalized versions of identity and community. If "the dynasty represents a caput mortuum of modernity"—the residue of an alchemical experiment or a "terminal moraine," the land thrown up at the end of a glacier's path—it is at least a felicitous coincidence that, by analogy, so much meaning is packed into these brief chapter ends. Daub has a deft touch with language. The book is jargon...

Characterization of the Caput Mortuum purple hematite pigment and synthesis of a modern analogue

This investigation addressed the characterization and the production methods of the purple pigmentCaput Mortuum used since pre-historic times until the eighteenth century. Literature hypotheses for its production after heating of ochres/Fe-hydroxides, with addition of white minerals of different composition has been experimentally reproduced, and disproved. An original synthesis after massive hematite that underwent fine grinding, followed by high temperature (900–1100 °C) annealing under oxidative conditions was carried out.Several natural and synthetic starting Fe-oxides and hydroxides were tested with these procedures, followed by compositional (X-Ray Powder Diffraction), spectroscopic (Reflectance spectroscopy, colorimetric measurements and Lab CIE color space), microscopic (Scanning Electron Microscopy coupled with Energy Dispersive Spectrometry), and magnetic characterization.The color changes undergone by hematite from red to purple could be mainly traced back to the grain dimensions resulting from the annealing process. The experiments on synthetic starting materials allowed excluding that the final color is affected by impurities. Moreover, it was determined that a purple ochre could not be obtained by thermal treatment of natural earths and that the purple pigment could only be manufactured by starting from hematite and not from red ochre.Finally, magnetic measurements further discriminated among different Caput Mortuum types.

The absolute that is not absolute: an alchemical reflection on the caput mortuum, the dark other of logical light

ABSTRACTThis paper challenges Wolfgang Giegerich’s sometimes sophisticated and at other times sophistic notion of absolute negative interiority. In contrast to his uroboric view of ‘psychology proper’, this author resists the successionist ideas of a post-Jungian, trans-human perspective and asserts the notion of an unassimilable and unsurmountable ‘not’. In this paper, the author revisions the traditional divide between Kant and Hegel, taking the ‘thing-in-itself’ as truly other than existing only for consciousness and arguing against privileging theunityof unity and difference. This paper entertains the alchemical ideas of a residue, acaput mortuum, and an archetypally cumbersome object, a real limit, which remains and unhinges the elevating process of spirit on its path to return to itself in absolute interiority. Rather, it acknowledges an abyss ‘behind the back of consciousness’, a non-reified living unconscious – a dark light, an absolute that is not absolute, but rather a gateway back to the beyond, at the root of imagination, wonder, and transformation.

The dog that is not a dog: a rejoinder to Stanton Marlan

ABSTRACTThis paper is a rejoinder to Stanton Marlan’s article, ‘The absolute that is not absolute: an alchemical reflection on the caput mortuum, the dark other of logical light.’ It challenges mischaracterizations by Marlan of Giegerich’s contribution to analytical psychology, not on the usual level of debate and counter-argument, but through psychological ‘seeing-through’. Marlan’s assertion that Giegerich’s psychology as the discipline of interiority approach is ‘too pure [a psychology] to treat ordinary human beings in the consulting room’ is responded to by turning the tables and using Marlan’s account of having had to euthanize his dog as ordinary case material with which to demonstrate the merit and analytic acuity of Giegerich’s mode of interpretation.

Quantum Paradigms of Psychopathology: From Consciousness to Neuroethics

The present work deals with the complexity of the arguments underlying the meaning of the quantum paradigm of psychopathology. In particular, the quantum approach to the understanding of the brain and consciousness, seems to present convergence of thinking of many scientists and also seems to be the most promising way in the approach of future research. The practical potency of classical neuroscience directed toward either beneficial or perverse purposes will prove in the end limited by that orthodox paradigm’s inherently poor explanatory power in linking mind and brain, especially at the basic level of the Hard Problem as Chalmers (1995) has termed. However, if quantum neurobiology should demonstrate greater explanatory power than does its classical counterpart, then an enhanced potential not only for constructive psychiatric application but also for politically motivated abuse will follow with a vengeance. If the mechanistic-reductionist cognitive approaches have been characterised by the metaphor of the “edifice”, of the solid Cartesian rock, all the forms of knowledge founded on complexity theory, have been characterised by the metaphor of the “network”, of thinking in relationships, in a dynamic, fluid, open manner. In the field of mental illness, this means setting aside both the organicist paradigm and the pseudo-phenomenological, “sentimental”, and therefore ideological, paradigm, in order to have an integrated view of biological objectiveness and humanistic psychotherapy. That is to say, an expression of diverse interrelated contributions from the various disciplines (psychiatry, psychology, biochemistry, anthropology, quantum physics, mathematics, philosophy). The observer thus becomes a builder of models, a manager of complexity, giving treatment the character of a truly empathic relationship. This is all the more so where distressing pathologies are involved, such as Major Depression (MD) and Bipolar Disorder (BD), caput mortuum of psychiatry, because the absence of cogent biological markers seriously compromises every form of therapy.

The Servilia tomb: an architecturally and pictorially important Roman building

One hundred and eleven samples from the important Servilia Roman tomb have been analysed for the first time by Raman spectroscopy, resulting in a complete characterisation of the pigment palette used for its remarkable wall paintings: 73 different pigment mixtures have been identified for the composition of its 11 colours and their tonalities. Dyer’s weld, an ancient organic yellow pigment, which was described by Vitruvius, has been identified and characterised for the first time in Roman wall paintings. Distinctive Raman spectroscopic signals which differentiate between haematite and caput mortuum (a violet colour from haematite which has been subjected to thermal treatment) are also reported. The use of the very expensive lazurite for a balance relates the importance of this otherwise ordinary instrument with psychostasia (the human soul weighing process) and is not found elsewhere in the tomb. The distribution of white minerals alone or in admixture is not related to any particular colouring pigment or figure; this possibly indicates that there was no specific use for each white mineral and that several craftsmen worked on the paintings, perhaps in different periods, or that the frescoes have been subjected to unrecorded restoration. We conclude that Raman spectroscopy is a valuable analytical technique for the unambiguous identification of mixtures of both organic and inorganic compounds, to study the degree of mineral crystallinity and for identifying treatment. These data are relevant for the holistic interpretation of the artwork in its historical, economical and social context.

Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society: New Translations on Politics, Bureaucracy, and Social Stratification (review)

262 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2016. Symonds’s reading is careful and convincing in drawing attention to some of the most perplexing and yet salient aspects of Weber’s work. He asserts that his commentary can be drawn from an internal reading of Weber without resort to other thinkers or to Weber’s biography, as other commentators have tended to do. When he concludes by considering some possible applications and prescriptions with respect to concerns that lie outside Weber’s immediate sphere of interest, however, he does not take the next step of turning these lessons back on how Weber’s writings themselves can be read. For example, he does not ask what the implications are of this understanding of modernity as an endless pursuit of meaning for how we understand Weber’s final reflections on the meaning of meaning itself. To take up this question would mean considering whether Weber’s interpretive method can account not just for the fateful loss of meaning in the face of death but also for its bewildering abundance and surplus under modern conditions of existence. Confronting this issue might also entail interrogating the androcentric assumptions inherent in the ethic of brotherhood as a response to the problem of suffering, despite its extra-familial direction or universalistic aspiration : for example, in the direction of an ethic of motherhood or of otherhood more generally. Finally, the hermeneutic question of the meaning of meaning might lead us to ask whether Weber’s writings themselves still have meaning and significance in a disciplinary and intellectual context where social theory no longer guides large-scale comparative and historical scholarship, and where ‘the meaning of value-freedom’ (the topic of one of his last essays) is often undermined , or even dismissed as impossible and nonsensical. It is to the credit of Symonds’s book that even when these questions are not posed directly they are often implicitly invoked. Thomas Kemple University of British Columbia Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters, eds., Weber’s Rationalism and Modern Society: New Translations on Politics, Bureaucracy, and Social Stratification (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), ix + 233pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-1-137-37353-3. $100.00. Translations are a bit like buses: you wait ages for one, and then lots arrive around the same time. They are also like buses in an unregulated system, in that some are brand new, and others well past their Book Reviews 263© Max Weber Studies 2016. date with the scrapyard, sometimes re-badged in shiny new livery. Readers of this journal do not need to be reminded of Max Weber’s move from translational penury, with nothing but Julien Freund’s Le Savant et le politique in France and Parsons (and Gerth and Mills) in the Anglosphere, (and, in both countries, a selection of his methodological writings—Freund again, and Shils and Finch), to an embarras du choix today. This one is something different. Most academic translators are what are now pejoratively termed ‘lone scholars’ or linguistically complementary dyads like Gerth and Mills. This book is the result of a collaborative and pedagogic project over several years, carried out by the Waters in Germany and the United States, beginning in an academic English class in the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen . Careful editorial control has ensured that these various Autorenkollektive did not design a camel. The four texts, three from Economy and Society (‘Klassen, Stände, Parteien’ from chapter 8, ‘Die Disziplinierung und die Versachlichung der Herrschaftsformen’ and ‘Wesen, Voraussetzungen und Entfaltung der bürokratischen Herrschaft’ from chapter 9) and finally ‘Politik als Beruf’, are well chosen to represent key themes of Weber’s sociology in formal and slightly more informal mode. All four are accompanied by an excellent apparatus of footnotes, put together partly at the initiative of Benjamin Elbers. One of these also features in the introductory ‘Translation Notes’: along with more familiar Weberian concepts, the editors select caput mortuum. This, I was glad to learn, has a concrete meaning: the dirty residue left by an alchemist , and is used by Weber to describe what they call ‘the soulless factory discipline that emerged from the discipline of the militaries’ (33). As for the translations themselves, on...

Catoptrica

Catoptrica Jane Alison (bio) 1 Old poet, a question: looking back on life now that it’s done, would you say that you lived in true space? Or did you inhabit a zone that was not quite dimensional, a vanishing point, maybe, between beholder and beheld? And what about time: did you feel the present, or erase it through perpetual reflection upon the past? If you were the story of Narcissus, I think you might be neither the boy gazing into the pool nor his reflection gazing back. You might be the shine of water. 2 You told us once of a mirror hanging in the foyer of a large house, a mirror that a lovely boy glanced into one day. He was a delivery-boy for a tailor, you said, an amateur athlete on Sundays. What kind? Oh, a runner, maybe, or a swimmer. No: let’s say a boxer. Traces of bruise on the jaw, there, can see it shaded with slate grey, with caput mortuum violet. He stepped inside the house to deliver a parcel: a box of silk gloves, an expensive pen. Waiting for the receipt, he turned, and his eyes caught his eyes in the glass. Beauty! Startled, he translated beauty quickly to flaw, a blur of sweat on his upper lip to be blotted with a finger. Then the maid returned with his receipt, and he nodded, stepped out, was gone. But the mirror. In its long dulling years affixed to the wall, of all the faces, bodies, flowers, and hats that had streamed over its glass, had it ever caught such beauty? (Narcissus asks the old trees standing around him and his pool: Have you ever seen sadder love?) The mirror held this boy’s face for only a flash, but after he had gone it burned still, reflecting still the sun. [End Page 123] 3 Old poet: old mirror. Heron of Alexandria (your town) was first to understand the optics of reflection, rays of light striking a shining surface at the right angle, bouncing back to meet an eye. 4 In that poem you gave us a mirror, parcel, door, and street. Even though your point of view lay midway between illusory and tangible, your objects, poet, were solid. But objects seems a passive word, when these items of yours stirred drama. A table, bed, or chair; a handkerchief, a candle. Outside, a balcony or alley. A shop selling ties, wine, or smokes, as well as those shops’ glass windows. Ordinary enough, yet these items held more potency for you, something painters of your day, just over the sea, might call the metafisica. An aura around daily objects: an air of the past, or the possible. 5 There lives today in Bologna a man named Parmigianni who creates art from smoke. He hangs huge canvases upon a wall and arranges things against them: long shelves of books, heavy drapes. Then he heaps up tires in the room and sets them alight. He hurries out, seals the place, waits. When the toxic pyre has flamed to ash, he airs the room, enters, and gingerly pulls from the canvas the objects he’d arranged—the books on their shelves, drapes hanging from a sooty rod. What’s left on the canvas: these objects’ ghostly shadows, in smoke. [End Page 124] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. “Untitled.” By Claudio Parmiggiani. 2008. Courtesy of the artist and Bortolami Gallery, New York. You, too, work with past conflagration, although your medium is not smoke but visions, phantasia burning for years in your mind. A frantic session with a boy in a wine shop, for instance, or silent exchanges with one selling ties. Yet your phantasia are not only seen but sensations almost fully re-felt. Imagine! Feeling that pleasure again, although now you are alone, and the pleasure is borne only by thought. Imagine: feeling that past [End Page 125] pain. It is not really possible to re-experience pleasure or pain; they can be recollected abstractly but not, exactly, felt. Yet you conjure. Your eyes project images on the page, and within the lines live those moments still inside your skull: moments...

Mood Psychopathologies: An Integrated Complexity-Based Interpretation

If the mechanistic-reductionist cognitive approaches have been characterised by the metaphor of the “edifice”, of the solid Cartesian rock, all the forms of knowledge founded on complexity theory have been characterised by the metaphor of the “network”, of thinking in relationships, in a dynamic, fluid, open manner. In the field of mental illness, this means setting aside both the organicist paradigm and the pseudo-phenomenological, “sentimentalistic”, and therefore ideological, paradigm, in order to have an integrated view of biological objectiveness and humanistic psychotherapy. That is to say, an expression of diverse interrelated contributions from the various disciplines (psychiatry, psychology, biochemistry, anthropology, quantum physics, mathematics, philosophy). The observer thus becomes a builder of models, a manager of complexity, giving treatment the character of a truly empathic relationship. This is all the more so where distressing pathologies are involved, such as Major Depression (MD) and Bipolar Disorder (BD), caput mortuum of psychiatry, because the absence of cogent biological markers seriously compromises every form of therapy. Hence the identification of a biological platform (fatty acids of platelets) as a starting point for a correct classification of MD with respect to BD.

“This is a Matter of Numbers, Not of Heart”. Re-signing Shock Labor in 1970s Film

The 1970s mark a turning point in the representation of “exemplary workers”, shock workers and work heroes, who had for years been part of the enterprise to increase (mainly) industrial production in state socialist countries and beyond. From its very beginnings, shock labor was inseparable from its representation in the mass media, mainly documentaries and propaganda films. In contrast, in the early 1970s, post-war work successes turn into a caput mortuum, a worthless residue of early “official” socialism. Accordingly, the image of the shock labor movement and of shock workers-as-innovators turns out to be interesting material for artists and filmmakers, who resurrect and rediscover this long-forgotten idea, turning it into an instrument of criticism of the system that advocated it, without criticizing the movement’s most prominent actors. Yugoslav, Polish and Italian directors Bahrudin Bata Cengic, Andrzej Wajda and Elio Petri in their films Slike iz života udarnika (Images from the Life of a Shock Worker, 1972), Czlowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble, 1976) and La classe operaia va in paradiso (Lulu the Tool, 1972) respectively, re-sign the essence of work heroism. The problem of increasing production quotas, a “good and happy family life” accompanied by indispensable cultural education and the inclusion of workers in political life are some of the prevailing topics these directors use to build their own eclectic, critical as well as apologetic vision of the shock labor past or present. Key words: shock labor, Stakhanovism, film, Alija Sirotanovic, socialism, Slike iz života udarnika

The use of a multi-method approach to identify the pigments in the 12th century manuscript Liber Floridus

A selection of illuminations of the 12th century manuscript Liber Floridus was analysed with Raman spectroscopy (in situ and laboratory measurements), X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, UV-fluorescence photography and infrared reflectography (IRR). The aim of this study is to determine the pigments used, in order to search for anachronisms. Using a combination of Raman spectroscopy (molecular information) and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (elemental information) following pigments could be identified: ultramarine (Na 8–10Al 6Si 6O 24S 2–4), azurite (2CuCO 3·Cu(OH) 2), caput mortuum (Fe 2O 3), vermilion (HgS), orpiment (As 2S 3) and lead white (2PbCO 3·Pb(OH) 2). Moreover, two synthetic red pigments, PR4 and PR176, and a degradation product, gypsum (CaSO 4·2H 2O), were present in the manuscript. To establish the origin of the modern materials UV-fluorescence photography was used. Infrared reflectography (IRR) was applied to visualise the underdrawing of the investigated folios.

Romano-British wall paintings: Raman spectroscopic analysis of fragments from two urban sites of early military colonisation

Raman spectroscopic analyses of 1st century AD Romano-British villa wall-painting fragments from two important military and early urban centres at Colchester and Lincoln have demonstrated some interesting contrasts in technique and palette usage. Colchester, the earliest fortified settlement, developed a sophisticated painting and craft industry compared with Lincoln in the assimilation of novel substrate preparation ideas and pigment adoption. The earliest use of the rather rare purple mineral pigment, caput mortuum, hitherto reported in only a few Roman villas elsewhere in mainland Europe, is in evidence in this early phase settlement and the use of gypsum as a special ground preparation agent as an additive to the more common limewash putty to enhance the effect of the use of lazurite as a pigment is worthy of note in this context. Otherwise, the pigments are seen to be those that are quite normally encountered in Roman villas, namely, haematite, goethite, terre verte, and carbon. The results of this study indicate that at Colchester there was a continued development in technique into the colonial phase compared with a stagnation in Lincoln; these scientific results have created a stimulus for further historical research into pigment and techniques development for wall paintings at the fringe of the Roman Empire in the 1st–3rd Centuries AD.

An extensive colour palette in Roman villas in Burgos, Northern Spain: a Raman spectroscopic analysis

Seventy-five specimens from thirty fragments of Roman villa wall-paintings from sites in Burgos Castilla y Leon, Spain, have been analysed by Raman spectroscopy. This is the first time that a Raman spectrocopic study of Roman wall-paintings from Spain has been reported. The extensive range of tonalities and colour compositions contrasts with the results found in other provinces of the Roman Empire, for example Romano-British villas. Calcite, aragonite, haematite, caput mortuum, cinnabar, limonite, goethite, cuprorivaite, lazurite, green earth, carbon and verdigris have been found as pigments. Some mineral mixtures with different tonalities have been made using different strategies to those more usually found. Of particular interest is the assignation of the Tarna mine for the origin of the cinnabar used for obtaining the red colour in some specimens analysed here. The wide range of colours, tonalities and minerals found in some of the sites studied in this work is suggestive of a high social status for the community.

A post-Byzantine icon of St Nicholas painted on a leather support. Microanalysis and characterisation of technique

The pigments, organic materials and techniques used on a post-Byzantine icon of St Nicholas were determined by means of several micro-analytical techniques. The icon painter covered the leather support with silver leaf about 3 μm thick to create a smooth working surface. Animal glue was used to secure the leaf to the leather, and FTIR spectroscopy has identified another layer, 30–60 μm thick, of the same material applied as a primer above the silver. Above that, a layer of lead white covering the entire surface creates a white substratum serving the same purpose as the gesso on a wood panel. The colour palette, determined by means of scanning electron microscopy and FTIR spectroscopy, is very simple. Only seven colours were identified: lead white, caput mortuum, red and yellow ochre, cinnabar, carbon black and smalt. As far as we know, this is the first time that smalt has been found on a Byzantine icon. Since smalt was chemically synthesised only after 1500 AD, it may be concluded that this icon was painted after the end of the 15th century. Beeswax was used as a protective varnish.

Caput mortuum: spectroscopic and structural studies of an ancient pigment.

The use of a pigment variously described as caput mortuum, usta or ostrum to provide a deep purple colour in ancient wall-paintings was highly prized, despite the technical difficulties associated with its application. With the Raman spectroscopic characterization of pigments in ancient frescoes and wall-paintings becoming more widespread, it is timely to consider the identification of this material either as a generic haematite alone or in admixture with contemporary blue pigments. Here, Raman and infrared spectroscopic, X-ray diffractometric and scanning electron microscopic structural studies have been undertaken to characterize caput mortuum and to identify a specimen of Roman wall-painting dating from the 3rd century.

Romano-British wall-painting fragments: a spectroscopic analysis

Raman spectroscopic analyses of fragmented wall-painting specimens from a Romano-British villa dating from ca. 200 AD are reported. The predominant pigment is red haematite, to which carbon, chalk and sand have been added to produce colour variations, applied to a typical Roman “limewash” putty composition. Other pigment colours are identified as white chalk, yellow (goethite), grey (soot/chalk mixture) and violet. The latter pigment is ascribed to “caput mortuum”, a rare form of haematite, to which kaolinite (possibly from Cornwall) has been added, presumably in an effort to increase the adhesive properties of the pigment to the substratum. This is the first time that kaolinite has been reported in this context and could indicate the successful application of an ancient technology discovered by the Romano-British artists. Supporting evidence for the Raman data is provided by X-ray diffraction and SEM-EDAX analyses of the purple pigment.

Ochre-differentiation through micro-Raman and micro-FTIR spectroscopies: application on wall paintings at Meteora and Mount Athos, Greece

The most widely-used inorganic pigments of Byzantine and post-Byzantine hagiography are earth pigments called ochres such as, red and yellow ochres, limonite, goethite, raw and burnt sienna, caput mortuum and hematite. The present experimental work proposes a technique of differentiation that allows one to distinguish among all the different kinds of iron oxides, thereby providing a better understanding of the painting technique used on portable icons and wall paintings. The ratios between the main spectroscopic peaks, attributable to the major components usually present in ochres, were calculated and compared, one against the another, from the spectra obtained through micro-Raman spectroscopy. Elementary composition is also revealed through a scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis. The possibility for detailed study on a particular Byzantine ochre palette can thus be performed based on the small differences in its nature and composition. These differences can first be observed and then measured among all of the natural earth pigments, through μRaman and μFTIR spectroscopies.