Ion beam analysis of silver leaves in gilt leather wall coverings.

This study provided an assessment of the sensitivity of the ion beam techniques used, and highlighted the complexity of such analyses on thin silver leaves due to the different factors affecting them, and the composite nature of the object. Thus, the thicknesses calculated from the RBS analyses presented a great variability that seems to be related to the leaf characteristics, the manufacturing process and/or the life of the decor. Nevertheless, observations suggest that silver leaves coming from the Netherlands are thicker than the ones from Spain, Italy or France. Concerning the elemental composition, the results discarded previous hypotheses and the focus was made on gold and mercury trace elements, thus it was shown that leaves in Italian decors seem to have generally a low content of these two elements. Despite the large number of decor analyzed, the corpus should be expanded over to confirm the hypotheses raised by this research. Nevertheless the results gained from this work bring new light on the factors affecting thin metal leaves in general, which will be beneficial to all fields dealing with their analysis. PMID: 31514840 [PubMed - in process]
Source: Talanta - Category: Chemistry Authors: Tags: Talanta Source Type: research