NIR confocal microscopy for painting diagnostics

We designed and built a simple fiber-optic confocal laser-scanning interference microscope, operating in the near infrared (NIR), for the analysis of ancient paintings. We applied this instrument to the non-invasive optical sectioning of the paint layers. The device was tested on both laboratory samples and ancient paintings. The preliminary results show that optical sections obtained by NIR confocal microscopy are comparable to those recorded with optical coherence tomography and a few examples of application are presented.