Tímea Varga, Zoltán May

Short biography of Tímea Varga DLA Tímea Varga obtained her diploma as a painting restorer at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. During her doctoral training, she dealt with the examination possibilities of the binding media of painted layers. She gained experience in the field of optical microscopic sample examinations, and works in this field at the National Museum Conservation and Storage Centre. Her tasks include the stereomicroscopic investigation of the surface of the objects and, if necessary, the layer structure or pigment examination with polarising microscope.

Short biography of Zoltán May Phd Zoltán May is a senior research fellow working in the field of instrumental analytical chemistry. His main area is inorganic elemental analysis with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) as non-destructive method and inductively coupled plasma optical and mass spectrometry (ICP-OES and ICP-MS) as invasive techniques. Analysing of pigments on paintings is one of his main research area applying non-invasive and non-destructive XRF methods like hand-held portable XRF (pXRF) and large area scanning micro-XRF with Bruker Jetstream M6 (MA-XRF) producing compositional maps of chemical elements.

ABSTRACT

Violet Pigments on Artefacts from the Collection of Museum of Fine Arts Budapest

Tímea Varga^1*, Zoltán May^1,2, Mátyás Horváth¹, Máté Karlik¹, Tímea Cseh¹, Péter Németh ^3
1National Museum Conservation and Storage Centre Budapest, Hungary
²Institute of Materials and Environmental Chemistry, HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
³Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences, HUN-REN. Budapest, Hungary

As a result of work gradually starting in 2021 at the diagnostic department of the National Museum Restoration and Storage Center, we can get a deeper insight into the production techniques and characteristics of material usage of the artworks in the Museum of Fine Arts and the Hungarian National Gallery. Thanks to the different techniques based on each other -phototechnical, optical microscopy, X-ray fluorescence and scanning electron microscopy – we had the opportunity to identify inorganic, artificial purple pigments that had not been determined before on pieces from Hungarian collections. During research into the use of materials in the works of the famous Hungarian painters János Vaszary and József Rippl-Rónai who lived at the turn of the twentieth century, the palette of Hungarian artists was enriched with a ” new ” colour, violet pigments. Although the literature considers purple pigments of its own color to be among the relatively rarely used materials, we can find more and more examples of them in international publications, which appear in the works of Munch, Picasso or even Pollock, among others. In the pictures of Vaszary and Rippl-Rónai, the cobalt purple pigments determined by several techniques give us new, additional information about the use of materials of the period, thus helping art historians and researchers of related sciences.