The wonders of technology have revealed a new portrait by Goya. It’s underneath his Portrait of Don Ramón Satué, which is owned by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
According to a press release, the new imaging technology is called scanning macro-Xray — flourescent spectrometry and it was developed by the University of Antwerp and the Delft University of Technology. It quotes Professor Joris Dik of the Delft University as saying “We can take the new mobile scanner to a museum and examine a painting layer by layer. This enables us to reconstruct the layers of paint and colours present underneath the visible painting without ever touching it.”
In this case, the scans reveal that Goya (1746-1828) painted over a more formal portrait of a man in a uniform…
Re-posted with permission.