Analyses of decorated papers: Potential and preliminary results on persianate manuscripts from 15th – 17th centuries

This talk will be divided into two parts. In the first part I will present the analytical techniques and the equipment used by the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures that can be applied for the study of decorated papers. The analyses aim to determine the constituent materials of papers, pigments, dyes and metals and the techniques used for their production. I will focus in particular on the kind of information these techniques allow us to gather: through optical microscopy we conduct fibre analysis in order to identify the plant used as raw material in paper production while Reflectography, X-Ray Fluorescence and InfraRed, Raman and Visible Reflectance Spectroscopy are used to study the sizing agents, the pigments, dyes and metals. In the second part I will show some results obtained by the application of these techniques on a few Persianate manuscripts, dating between the 15th and 17th centuries, belonging to the corpus of Ilse Sturkenboom.