True Colors
You have never seen these paintings.
Pigments fade. Varnish yellows. The paintings in museums today are not what the artists made.
Drag the slider to see what was lost.
How do we know this? Hide details
How it works
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01
Identify the pigments
Conservation labs map a painting's pigments with X-ray fluorescence, reflectance imaging spectroscopy, and microscopic cross-sections — establishing what the artist originally laid down.
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02
Model the degradation
Each pigment has a known chemistry of failure: red lakes break their chromophore under UV, lead chromate reduces from Cr(VI) to Cr(III), natural-resin varnishes oxidize and yellow. The pathway is published.
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03
Reverse the chemistry
In CIE Lab* color space we apply the inverse shift to the regions where the failed pigment was present — putting back, computationally, the light each pigment used to absorb.