Identification of proteinaceous adhesives in the wooden backing of Piero della Francescaˈs painting Pala of Saint Bernardino: a gas chromatographic study

Quantitative determination of un-derivatised amino acids in artistic mural paintings using high-performance liquid chromatography/electrospray ionization triple quadrupole mass spectrometry

“…Valine concentrations were also higher in this binder compared to the others. These results are comparable with those reported in the literature [44,45]. As suggested by Prikryl et al [46] the amino acids concentration series can be used to identify the type of proteinaceous binders.. Our results show that the amino acid series for a casein based binder is Glu > Ser > Pro > Leu > Asp > Thr > Phe > Val > Ala > Ile > 4-Hyp > 3-Hyp; the glue binder series is Glu ≥ 4-Hyp > Asp > Pro > Ser ≥ Ala > Phe > Thr > Leu > Val > Ile > 3-Hyp; and the egg binder series is Glu > Ser ≥ Asp > Ala > Leu > Thr > Phe > Pro > Val > Ile > 4-Hyp > 3-Hyp.…”

Characterisation of proteinaceous binders in artistic paintings by chromatographic techniques

“…a) Transformation of amino acids into their N-trifluoroacetyl methyl esters [3], or into the analogous propyl [27,28,31,58] or butyl esters [32]. This derivatisation procedure entails two separate reaction steps.…”

“…egg, animal glue and casein. Different ratios have been proposed [25,30,31,36,38,61,65], for example gly/glu, gly/asp, pro/asp, glu/pro, glu/asp, glu/ ala, ala/pro, ala/gly. Since the methods are usually based on the fact that animal glue contains substantially higher amounts of gly with respect to egg and milk, while casein contains higher amounts of glu with respect to egg, gly and glu are always included in the most significant ratios.…”

GC/MS in the Characterisation of Protein Paint Binders

“…The range of chromatographic techniques applied to the characterisation of the proteinaceous constituents in paint includes paper chromatography [32,33], thin-layer chromatography (TLC) [34][35][36], ionic exchange chromatography [37,38], reversed phase high-performance liquid chromatography with pre-column derivatisation [14,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45], gas chromatography [7,15,16,30,[46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57], and pyrolysis combined with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (Py-GC/MS) [58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66]. Gas chromatography (GC) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC/MS) are among the most commonly used techniques for the identification of proteinaceous paint media, and they generally give more accurate and reliable results than other methods due to their high specificity and sensitivity [5,11,67].…”

“…Amino acid racemisation has been used mainly in an archaeological context for about 40 years to determine relative dates of biological materials such as bones, shells and teeth. A number of significant results [54,[101][102][103] have been generated, but many have been questioned and the technique remains controversial. In spite of this, the possibility of reliable amino acid racemisation dating remains attractive.…”