Hidden painting by Degas discovered with x-ray fluorescence
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.0210005
New York Times : Beneath the painting Portrait of a Woman by French impressionist Edgar Degas lies another portrait that he had painted over—a common practice among artists of that era. That earlier portrait has now been revealed through the use of a type of particle accelerator called a synchrotron. Using the synchrotron’s intense x-ray beam, David Thurrowgood of the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia and colleagues scanned the painting and analyzed it point by point, looking for the chemical signatures of the various metallic elements used in the pigments of the paint. With those data, they were able to digitally reconstruct on a computer monitor the hidden portrait; the subject has turned out to be one of Degas’s favorite models, Emma Dobigny.
