A multidisciplinary approach to establish the authenticity of a version of Rubens' "Garden of Love."

The various procedures for arriving at a plausible attribution for an Old Master painting have grown and been refined over a considerable span of time. They all are based essentially in the application of comparisons made between a certain or at least accepted paradigm and the less certain, still questionable painting for which a desirable attribution is sought. Our study applies imaging and chemical analysis to identifying aspects known to Garden of Love, attributed to Peter Paul Rubens and his studio. Painted around 1630 to celebrate the artist's marriage to his second wife. Long established protocols of x-ray, cross-sections and pigment analysis have carried authentication to a higher level of achievement but often the results were not conclusive. We introduce here the addition of UV FLORESCENCE, IR photography, IR False color images, FORS, Raman and X ray fluorescence spectroscopies, OCT IMAGING and GCMS/ pyrolysis FTIR and SEM to bring additional identification of materials.