Three Art-Historical Examples

1. Fragment of a Relief of an Angel

This nine-minute video made in 1996 shows how neutron activation analysis performed at the Brookhaven National Laboratory was used to investigate the provenance (origin) of a fragment of limestone sculpture depicting an angel, part of the collection of The Cloisters in New York City. See more details about this fragment at the museum website .

2. Analysis of the Head of an Angel

According to art historians, this limestone Head of an Angel, acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1990, is a fine example of thirteenth-century Parisian sculpture.

 
Head of an Angel, Paris, ca. 1250
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Cloisters Collection (1990.132 ).

(Photo: The Metroplitan Museum of Art)

To test this hypothesis, a very small sample of its stone, taken from an inconspicuous spot, was analyzed by neutron activation to determine the stone's composition. When the concentrations of certain elements found in the sample are compared with those for a group of sculptures from the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Paris (see diagram below), the elemental composition of the angel's head and the cathedral sculpture are seen to match closely. This finding supports the hypothesis of art historians about the origin of this sculptural fragment.

In the diagram the dotted line displays the average concentrations of selected elements in a collection of samples taken from sculpture from Notre-Dame Cathedral. (Such a depiction is sometimes called a "compositional profile.") Triangular points (sometimes obscured by other points in this graph) indicate the concentrations of the same elements found in the sample from the angel's head.

Other points on the graph demonstrate that stone from the Head of a Virtue at the Duke University Museum of Art and a segment of a choir screen, now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, also closely match the compositional profile of sculptures from Notre-Dame.

3. The Case of the Headless Apostle

To learn how neutron activation analysis help clarify the origin of the head of an apostle in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, see this New York Times web page .

This example is part of a 2006 New York Times article, "Rays and Neutrons, for Art’s Sake " about the use of neutron activation and other techniques to discover the origin of many types of art.

At the time this article was published, an exhibit at the the Metropolitan Museum of Art featured this and other sculptural fragments: “Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture .” Some of the sculptural fragments in this exhibit have been studied using neutron activation analysis and are in our database.

Other Examples may be found in some of the publications listed in our Bibliography.