ST PETERSBURG. Can nuclear explosions advance art history? A former curator from the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg believes they can. She has developed a new method for dating paintings in collaboration with Russian scientists which, she says, provides “indisputable” evidence of whether a painting was made before or after 1945.
According to the inventors, the new patented technology is based on the idea that man-made nuclear explosions in the 1940s and 1950s released isotopes into the environment that do not occur naturally. The tiniest traces of these isotopes, Caesium-137 and Strontium-90, permeated the planet’s soil and plant life, and eventually ended up in all works of art made in the post-war era because natural oils are used as binding agents for paints
Thursday, June 26, 2008