AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

For the past three years, the Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona, the oldest library in the world, has been the site of a manifold collaboration among four scientific- and two scholarly teams representing eight countries to solve one of the most intractable problems in cultural heritage imaging. The Palimpsests in Danger project was convened to address the illegibility of two of the most important palimpsests in existence: the Verona Gaius, the only remaining witness to Roman law, and the Verona Vergil which, along with known undertexts containing Euclid and Livy, we revealed to contain a new Apuleius. 

Over two centuries, both palimpsests had been treated with multiple layers of two different chemicals: oakgall reagent and Gioberti tincture. The manuscripts, their parchment weakened by the reagents’ corrosive acids, were then disbound and set in gelatin. Creating a chemical layer that overwhelms fluorescent response from the parchment and attenuates the infrared, the chemical reagents proved to be nearly insuperable impediments to even state-of-the-art multispectral imaging.  

To learn more about the precise nature of the challenge and to find effective recovery techniques, the Early Manuscript Electronic Library, supported by the Lazarus Project, the University of Hamburg, and the University of Torun, organized a program of material analysis, new imaging modalities, and innovative image processing techniques all supported by a grant from the Arcadia Foundation. XRF, XRD, and Raman spectroscopy furnished specifics about inks and reagents, whilst scanning XRF, IR Reflectography, RTI, and the newly-developed techniques of IR Fluorescence MSI and scanning Optical Coherence Tomography (OCD) yielded new images of the undertext. 

This talk will reveal our results for the first time, covering the exact chemical and imaging challenges of chemical reagent-damaged manuscripts, the advantages and drawbacks of each technology and processing technique used, show never-before-seen images of the undertexts from the Gaius and the Vergil palimpsests, and make recommendations for best practice. Above all, it will highlight the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration among scientists and scholars from the US (EMEL, University of Rochester, Rochester Institute of Technology, UCLA) and Europe (University of Hamburg, University of Torun, the Sorbonne, Oxford University, the Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona).