Pseudo-noise pulse compression thermography of the Raffaellino del Colle "Sacra famiglia con San Giovanni Battista” during painting restoration

Abstract

Active thermography of panel paintings can retrieve useful information about the support and the preparation layer behind the pictorial one. The main challenges are obtaining such information by using low power excitation to avoid any possible alteration of the painting and processing it to gain insight about the stratigraphy of the artwork. Pseudo-noise active pulse compression thermography in combination with time- and frequency-domain analysis was used here to face these challenges. The procedure was applied to a panel painting from Raffaellino del Colle, a former Raffaello’s pupil, owned by Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, during painting restoration at the Restoration Laboratory of the Tuscia University