A spectroscopic approach to the study of organic pigments in the field of cultural heritage

Characterization of pigments in archaeological finds requires an experimental approach able to avoid the destruction or perturbation of the artwork. Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy technique may provide useful information in terms of chemical composition by using very small sample quantities and without samples manipulation. In this paper some pigments and an archeological find, discovered in Messina, have been analyzed with new SERS substrates prepared with Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) technique with two different instrumentations. In both cases we quenched the fluorescence phenomena and enhanced Raman peaks.