Characterization of pigment and binder in badly conserved illuminations of a 15th-century manuscript

In this work we report a pre-restoration spectroscopic study by a multi-technique approach on the green pigment and the binder used in illuminations in a codex of the late 15th century. Our analysis aimed to characterize the badly deteriorated parts of the codex, mainly the green parts, by electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and infrared spectroscopy (ATR-IR). We will show that a combined study by EPR and IR spectroscopies on model systems allowed us to refine the general information obtained with the other techniques and to identify the binding media surrounding the chromophore Cu(II) ion. © 2013 University of Oxford.