Raman spectroscopic analysis of selected astronomical and cartographic folios from the early 13th century Islamic ‘Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes’

Abstract

The Arabic treatise 'Kitāb Gharā'ib al-funūn wa-mulah . al-'uyūn' ('The Book of Curiosities. . .'), which contains a series of important early maps and celestial diagrams has recently been acquired by The Bodleian Library. Previous examination of the text and paper has led to the suggestion that the manuscript is an early thirteenth-century copy of a treatise compiled in the late eleventh century in Egypt.The pigments and inks used for the illustrations on 11 folios selected from the treatise have been analysed using Raman spectroscopy in order to determine their compositions; SEM-EDX analysis has been used to help identify one of the green pigments as a copper-based pigment. The combined analysis shows that the palette is relatively small in comparison with the wide range of colours observable, and consists almost exclusively of cinnabar (or its synthetic equivalent, vermilion), orpiment, lazurite, indigo, a carbon-based black, basic lead carbonate ('lead white') and a copper-based green pigment, possibly a form of verdigris (found in only one of the maps).The only comparable study (but by diffuse reflectance spectroscopy) of Arabic material was that of 17 Arabic manuscripts from the eighth to the fifteenth century at the Bibliothèque nationale de France; that study revealed a rather different range palette, which commonly included minium (red lead), copper green and azurite, and mostly excluded indigo. However, 14 of the French manuscripts in the study were Quráns, and therefore not strictly comparable with the Bodleian manuscript, which is from a secular tradition. One of the three secular manuscripts in the French study, a thirteenth-century north African treatise (manuscript BN Arabe 2221), did have a remarkably similar palette to that of the Bodleian manuscript. This is a very small sample base from which to draw substantial conclusions, but the analysis of 'The Book of Curiosities' forms a valuable starting point on which to build our knowledge of the production of Arab manuscripts from this location and date.

Characterization of an ancient ‘chemical’ preparation: pigments and drugs in medieval Islamic Spain

“…The use of orpiment as a pigment seems to have been more popular in medieval Arabic and European manuscripts (Sullivan, 1952;FitzHugh, 1997;Brown and Clark, 2004a, 2004b, 2004cClark and van der Weerd, 2004;Clarke, 2004;Daniilia and Andrikopoulos, 2007;Bioletti et al, 2009;Miguel et al, 2009;Aceto et al, 2010). Of the medieval coloured inks, orpiment is mentioned in several Islamic manuscripts (Levey, 1962) and has been detected in the Qairaw an manuscripts (Ayed et al, 1998), in an early-13th-century Arabic treatise (Chaplin et al, 2006), in other 14th-century Iraqi and Persian manuscripts (Fitz-Hugh, 1997), and in the illumination of five 16th-to18th-century Islamic manuscripts (Burgio et al, 2008). There are few original written sources on the materials and techniques used in the making of medieval Arabic manuscripts.…”

“…Yellow was prepared with orpiment or pigments of various botanical materials (Levey, 1962;al-‛Abb ad ı, 2005). Although orpiment is discussed as a so-called basic pigment, it is also described as a pigment that is added little by little to tint basic colours; for instance, orpiment was mixed with different amounts of indigo to prepare green or pistachio inks (Levey, 1962;al-‛Abb ad ı, 2005), or with vermillion (Chaplin et al, 2006). Georgius Agricola (16th century AD), describing orpiment in his De Natura Fossilium (Book III), said that painters used the native mineral and binders utilized it to tint books (Agricola, 1955).…”

The use of mobile Raman spectroscopy to compare three full-page miniatures from the breviary of Arnold of Egmond

“…Fig. 4(a) shows the Raman spectrum of lead white, with the characteristic Raman band of the symmetric stretch vibration of CO 3 − at 1050 cm −1 . Lead white has been by far the most important of the white pigments used in Europe from the Roman period till the 19th century, when it was replaced by less toxic pigments such as zinc white.…”

“…Due to these advantages Raman spectroscopy was proven to be an interesting tool for the examination of works of art [1], in particular manuscripts. The Raman spectroscopic analysis of manuscripts has been mainly concerned with pigment identification, gathering information about the pigment palette [2,3] used for the illuminations or a pigment palette of a specific artist [4]. As a result of the identification of the pigments, also anachronisms can be traced [5] and information on the evolution of the pigment use [6] can be gathered.…”

Raman Microscopy Techniques for the Characterisation of Pigments

“…Chinese manuscripts Bell et al 2000), a c.13th Century Qur'an (Clark & Huxley 1996) knowledge of which will be used to govern conservation treatments (Chaplin et al 2006). …”