Lights and shadows on ancient painting

Abstract

The study mentions the preliminary results of pilot study
aimed at recovering the legibility of the Etruscan paintings
of the Campana Tomb in Veii (620-610 BCE), which have now almost completely vanished. Currently scholars only know them from drawings of the Nineteenth century, including especially those edited by L. Canina, L’antica città di Veii: descritta e dimostrata con i monumenti dal cav. Luigi Canina, Roma 1847, as well as the gouaches by Alessandro Morani painted in 1897 on behalf of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek of Copenhagen (currently at the Swedish Institute of Classical Studies in Rome). A combination of multispectral imaging acquired in reflection and in UV fluorescence and multivariate analysis (MHX) allowed the authors to recover the scene painted in the sampled area (which can be effectively compared now with the relevant Nineteenth century drawings).