Color appearance of painted artworks through protective glass

It is well known that artworks exposed in museums or galleries can be damaged by infrared and ultraviolet radiation. Moreover, if not properly protected, these precious paintings or sculptures can be also damaged by vandalism acts. Coated glasses can actually deal with both these problems. They can also improve the artworks viewing if an antireflection feature is realized. However such optical coatings should not affect color viewing. In this study we describe a new prototype of coating and investigate, by mean of psychophysical experiments, how it affects color perception relative to uncoated glass as well as commercial coating products made up by many coating layers (up to 50). Our results show that color discrimination in the condition in which colors were viewed through our coating prototype turned out in being better than in the experimental condition in which uncoated glass was used and surprisingly at least as efficient as the more expensive commercial coated glasses.