Multispectral reflectance imaging and reflectance spectroscopy at the interface of cultural heritage research and undergraduate education: Investigating a golden age Dutch painting at the Huntington

摘要

The National Gallery of Art (NGA) has pioneered multispectral reflectance imaging systems that are powerful tools for the analysis of art works and that can be constructed for under $20,000. Obtaining a dozen or more different images of a painting in different wavelength regions from 400–1000 nm enables an image cube to be constructed which can then be interrogated with remote sensing software such as ENVI. Washington and Lee University (W&L) has been working with NGA to integrate this equipment into undergraduate research and education involving cultural heritage objects at numerous museums This paper highlights powerful results obtained analyzing a 17th century Dutch painting at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens (The Huntington) in which several remote sensing imaging and spectroscopic techniques, along with computational manipulation of the signal data, have played a crucial role in the successful analysis.