Week 3: Materials don't lie (usually)

The chemistry and physics that catch a forger long after the eye is fooled — pigment dates, paper stock, and the science of an anachronism.

10 August 2027

An eye can be trained; a canvas can be aged by hand; a signature can be practised until it’s indistinguishable from the original. What’s much harder to fake is chemistry that didn’t exist yet. Titanium white wasn’t a commercial pigment before 1916 — a “seventeenth-century” painting containing it isn’t a matter of expert opinion, it’s a matter of mass spectrometry. This lecture is the materials-science half of detection: pigment and paper dating, the radiocarbon problem for anything organic, and why the most damning evidence against a forgery is usually the most boring — not a clumsy brushstroke, a lab result.

Outline#

• anachronistic materials: the Vermeer forgeries that timed themselves out
• how paper and canvas are dated, and what a forger can and can’t fake about their own materials
• why “it looks right” and “it tests right” are different claims, and only one of them survives a lab
• studio: this week’s bench work is about materials, not motifs