Plenary Special Lectures Looking Through Paintings

Paintings are windows into the history of human kind, our history. None of us can claim never to have set foot in a mu-seum to appreciate these beautiful works of art. The magnificent brushwork of Velazquez, the vivid colors and light effects of el Greco, the fine and detailed work of Rembrandt; and the emotional honesty and bold colors of Van Gogh are characteristics to be admired. They are all indications of the time, place and specific cultural moment in which the artists lived. Historians have been using this information in combination with correspondence and narrative accounts to reconstruct the moments of history in which the works came to light. For hundreds of years the public has only seen the surface of famous masterpieces by artists such as Van Gogh and Rem-brandt. Now, through a melding of innovative scientific techniques and art connoisseurship, completely different paintings and important clues about the artists themselves can be uncovered one layer at a time using non-invasive technologies. Re-searchers can calculate how and when an artist first began working on their composition by tracing fingerprints, brushstrokes and analyzing different layers of paint pigments. Art historians are increasingly turning to particle physics to authenticate masterpieces by artists like Rembrandt and Van Gogh, as well as to explore mysterious artworks lying beneath surface paint-ings. Just microns below their paint surface lay a wealth of information on Old Master Paintings. Hidden paint layers can in-clude underdrawing, underpainting or compositional alterations by the painter, or even younger layers related to later restora