Pigmentum News

In the two and a half years since our last redesign, a substantial amount has happened for the Pigmentum Project: we published the Pigment Compendium, won a L’Oréal Art and Science of Colour Prize, and joined the University of Oxford.

The new site reflects our progess, listing new members of the team, academic papers authored by members of the Project, and detailing our extensive collection of historical pigments, compiled for our work on the Compendium and now available to interested researchers.

Also newly available are extracts from the two books that comprise the Pigment Compendium, A Dictionary of Historical Pigments and Optical Microscopy of Historical Pigments. Both extracts can be found on Pigment Compendium page.

We are delighted to welcome Peter Paul Biro into our circle of collaborators. Paul, based in Montreal, Canada, is a conservator by training, but has many years’ experience as a microscopic analyst working on paintings.

His main focus since 1984 has been physical evidence from paintings, notably the identification and use of fingerprints and, now, recovery of DNA evidence. These approaches provide an exciting new perspective on establishing reference points for materials studies.

As well as pursuing his physical evidence studies in conjunction with Pigmentum Paul is also currently involved in the development and field-testing of the Lazurite database, helping establish it as a powerful collaborative tool.

Pigmentum provided a major contribution to the highly successful ‘Art and Microscopy’ conference held by the Royal Microscopical Society at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Co-organised by Dr. Nicholas Eastaugh, a number of team members also presented papers on a range of topics. Short abstracts of the various talks will be available shortly, while the papers themselves will appear across three issues of the RMS Proceedings during 2006.

This marks the beginning of an ambitious programme of publication for the Project that will include research that could not be included in the Pigment Compendium as well as new areas of study.

You can download the various papers presented by Pigmentum Project members here.

It is an honour for Pigmentum to announce that it is formally joining up with the University of Oxford, becoming a semi-autonomous research group within the School of Archaeology.

Pigmentum has had numerous links with the University for some time, especially the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art and the Department of Materials. However, this link will allow us to develop these ties at a deeper level and also provide means for extending the research we do.

Great care has been taken in the production of the Pigment Compendium. However, as with all works on this scale, mistakes have crept in. Consequently, we have published a short list of corrections which you can download PDF document).

If you notice further errors of this kind, please notify us so that we may rectify them in future editions. We hope that this will constitute the first of a series of updates that provides our readers with the latest information on historical pigments.

We are happy to announce that the Pigment Compendium CD-ROM is now available. Containing the material from both books—the Dictionary of Historical Pigments and the Optical Microscopy of Historical Pigments—as well as powerful search tools and other features, this interactive CD-ROM can be obtained through the publishers, Elsevier, and directly from the Project.

We were pleased to welcome Lisa Sertic on her internship from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Lisa has been studying green earth pigments, developing systematic ways of differentiating glauconite from celadonite. We hope to publish her methodology in the near future.

The Pigmentum Project is pleased and proud to announce that their magnum opus, the Pigment Compendium, has been published.

The two volumes—the Dictionary of Historical Pigments and the Optical Microscopy of Historical Pigments—are now available through the publishers, Elsevier, and directly from the Project. We hope to release the CD-ROM, which contains both books in an easy-to-use interactive format, early in the new year.

The Pigmentum Project are proud to announce that they have won the L’Oréal Art and Science of Colour Bronze Prize for their groundbreaking work in the field of pigment research.

Awarded each year by the L’Oréal Art and Science Foundation, the prize recognises those who contribute to innovative exchanges between art and science. The prize is now in its seventh year, and had an especially strong field with 285 entrants.

The team has just returned from Japan, where they received the prize and gave a talk on their work. More detailed information on the prize is available at the official website.

This summer the Pigmentum Project was happy to host David Sethatho and Anna Gilpin on placements from the Forensic Science department, King’s College London. David spent his time with us doing Raman and FTIR analysis while Anna performed LCMS on samples from our collection for the Pigmentum database.