Non-destructive detection of Co(II) in paintings and glasses

From classical times to the present day, pigments containing cobalt(II) have played an intermittent role. The most important cobalt blue pigments were smalt and Thénard's blue. In the present work, fibre optics reflectance spectroscopy (FORS) is proposed as a totally non-destructive method for the detection of cobalt(II) pigments in the visible and near infrared regions. This technique has been applied to the identification of cobalt(II) in a sixteenth-century wall painting and two fifteenth-century glass windows