Art and autoradiography

the long version

This book reports the most significant results of a scientific study of thirty-nine paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The works under investigation are by seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish artists, mainly Rembrandt and his school. Art and Autoradiography publishes data obtained by the use of a new technique: neutron activation autoradiography. Through this method, it is now possible to study the substructure of paintings, their genesis, and their condition in far greater detail than had been possible with the conventional techniques of X-ray radiography and infrared photography. As a result, an artist's creative process can now be studied very closely. Autoradiography provides significant information for resolving questions about an artist's oeuvre and about workshop variations, attribution, dating, and even doubted authenticity. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.