How many times have you approached a work of art to see the secret of the master’s workshop, and at the same time you discovered the delightful texture of the painting along with its unevenness, cracks and small imperfections? It is difficult to analyze it with the nose a few millimeters from the canvas or wooden panel, therefore – for the purposes of the GRIEG project and thanks to its financing – we have purchased HIROX digital microscope, with which we can scan images with micron resolution and “stitch” individual scans recreating the full image of the cultural object.
The first painting which we examined was Lucas Cranach the Elder’s “Madonna with Child among Angels”, which recently enriched the collection of the Wawel Royal Castle. It is a 16th-century panel painting.
Having such an accurate microscopic image of the work of art in a digital form will allow us to quantify the cracks network. It is one of the steps necessary to validate the computer model of craquelure pattern creation in paintings we are developing.
