Elemental analyses have been conducted on 61 coloured opaque glasses from the Malkata and Lisht New Kingdom glass factories. The presence of tin in several of the blue glasses suggests that a bronze casting byproduct or corrosion product was the source of the copper colorant for these glasses. A positive correlation between the lead and antimony concentrations of the yellow and green opaque glasses, plus a consistent excess of lead oxide in these glasses, suggests the use of antimony-rich cupellation litharge as the source for the Pb 2 Sb 2 O 7 colorant in these glasses. The metallurgical byproducts used to colour the Malkata and Lisht glasses provide an explicit mechanism for Peltenburg's theory of interaction between second millennium bc glassmakers and contemporary metalworkers.
Realgar and orpiment, arsenic sulfide pigments used in historic paints, degrade under the influence of light, resulting in transparent, whitish, friable and/or crumbling paints.
A confocal x-ray fluorescence microscope was built at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) to determine the composition of buried paint layers that range from 10-80 µm thick in paintings. The microscope consists of a borosilicate monocapillary optic to focus the incident beam and a borosilicate polycapillary lens to collect the fluorescent x-rays. The overlap of the two focal regions is several tens of microns in extent, and defines the active, or confocal, volume of the microscope. The capabilities of the technique were tested using acrylic paint films with distinct layers brushed onto glass slides and a twentieth century oil painting on canvas. The position and thickness of individual layers were extracted from their fluorescence profiles by fitting to a simple, semi-empirical model.
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