IBA in the museum: Why AGLAE

Abstract

The Research Laboratory of the Museums of France (LRMF) has been a part of the Louvre Museum since 1931. At the beginning, paintings were only examined by means of optical microscopy, under UV or IR light, or by X-ray radiography. With the development of archaeometry in the early 1960s, different spectrometric techniques have been applied to the analysis of works of art and archaeological objects: UV spectrometry, XRF, and even SEM coupled to an X-ray Si(Li) detector. Crystalline objects were investigated with XRD and Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR); organic matter with gas chromatography, FTIR, UV and visible spectrophotometry. Thus the principal aim of the LRMF is to characterize the materials and the techniques involved in the creation of art and archaeological objects, for example, methods of production, provenance studies, authentication, and conservation. (The problem of dating is for the time being only a minor subject of research at the LRMF.) Because of the valuable nature of such objects, nondestructive methods of analysis have been developed, and consequently the results have to be more and more accurate to answer the questions put to us by the art historian. Moreover, the works of art must stay inside the security area of the museum. Therefore, it was decided in 1982 to install within the Louvre an accelerator dedicated solely to museum problems. The installation of AGLAE, begun in 1984, has now been completed. The accelerator system, a Pelletron 6SDH2 from NEC, was rendered operational in June 1988. A general consensus with regard to the applications of the ion beam techniques in art and archaeology was arrived at during the International Workshop held in Pont-à-Mousson, France in 1985, which brought together museum scientists as well as IBA physicists who had applied these techniques to archaeology, geology and metallurgy. The initial research which has already been done at the Louvre followed the main conclusions of this workshop. Precise multi-element analysis and studies of the conservation of archaeological materials by the investigation of the diffusion of elements from the surface, are the first steps which take advantage of the IBA techniques in this new field of research at the crossroads of science and art history. © 1990.