The Combined Use of Non-invasive Methods for the Identification of Pigments and the Weathering Damage on Marble Figurines and Statues

The present research work aims at the investigation of the combined use of Non Destructive Testing techniques for the integrated characterization of marble artifacts with existing traces of polychromy, concerning the identification of pigments, the chemical composition of their structural materials as well as the assessment of the initial distribution of polychromy of the artifacts and their preservation state. Fiber Optics Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy (FODRS) and X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) techniques have been widely applied in order to characterize the structural materials and pigments on polychrome monuments. Additionally, a non-invasive analysis of the weathering damages and degradation evolution was performed in order to assess the preservation state of the artifacts, via Digital Image Processing, performed on the pictorial images of the artifacts, using the Integrated Computerized Analysis for Weathering (ICAW) technique.