Art Forgeries

Complete production of a work that is passed off as being of a particular period.

False claims regarding materials or workmanship.

The piecing together of old fragments to stimulate antiquity.

The selling as originals of faithful copies that were not intended to be taken as anything but copies.

False attribution of minor works to great masters.

There is a pattern in artwork forgery. It depends on the prevailing taste and fashion in the art community, trends favored by collectors, and contemporary art criticism. This analysis will look at some of the forgeries uncovered by chemistry techniques as well as looking at the various kinds of techniques chemists use to detect forgeries in artworks.

According to Dr. Robert Linke, “The chemical identification of inorganic and organic materials used in works of art provides both art historians as well as conservation scientists with important information i

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Careful and meticulous detail must be paid to the individual steps of the analysis process. As Dr. Robert Linke notes, with regard to the unique challenges the nature of such materials pose, “Their complex chemical composition, their natural variation of contents and their alteration due to environmental influences as well as the limited amount of sample material usually available for an analysis represents a challenge for modern analytical chemistry including sampling, sample preparation and the choice of the analysis technique” (1). The study of auto-oxidation processes and the use of X-ray, infrared, and ultraviolet photography are also used to detect forgeries. The use of mass spectrometry and infrared spectroscopy has increased in recent years to detect art forgeries as technologies have improved. Mass spectrometry allows the researcher to analyze the molecular structure of artworks, including from extremely small amounts of sample. Chromatography is routinely used prior to analysis and is another chemical application useful in detecting art forgeries. Infrared spectroscopy helps uncover such art forgery techniques as pentimento. Pentimento is the “painter’s term for the evidence in a work that the original composition
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Approximate Word count = 1391
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)