Study of Slavic Parchment by Raman and Luminescence Spectroscopies

The paper investigates a pigments palette founded at handwritten parchment fragment no. 29 from the collection of Finnish excerpts (the Russian Academy of Sciences Library (RASL), Finn. exc. 29, old code 4.9.28), dated to the XIV century. This manuscript, with the polychrome images used to decorate the capital letters of the text, has not been restored. Using Raman spectroscopy, we found the use of cinnabar for red shades, identified a mixture of sulfur–arsenic pigments (orpiment and pararealgar), and found a mixture of indigo pigment and gypsum in various ratios for blue shades. The possibility of detecting the characteristic luminescence of the identified pigments from real (nonmodel) samples was studied under excitation with laser radiation of various wavelengths.