Project at the Biblioteca Capitolare di VeronaPalimpsests in Danger, Scientific Imaging to the Rescue

6 November 2023

Photo: Ivan Shevchuk

To make the undertexts on palimpsests legible, 19th-century scholars used chemicals that severely damaged the valuable manuscripts. Modern imaging techniques might be the last chance to recover the writing. Experts from the CSMC now take part in a major pilot study to determine how this can be done.

In the early 19th century, European scholars scrutinised thousands of palimpsest manuscripts. In the process, they rediscovered major classical works, such as Gaius’s Institutes, the only surviving classical Roman lawbook, found in Verona in 1816. Understandably, they were eager to make the undertexts legible again. Unfortunately, however, they only knew rather brute ways to realise their ambition: they painted the folios with chemical reagents in hope to revivify the erased ink. This method had severe unintended side effects: the chemical compounds stained the surface of the parchment dark brown and black, obscuring most of the text. This chemical-induced damage is both irreversible and progressive.

Today, palimpsests with chemical reagents are preserved in major libraries in Milan, Verona, Vercelli, Turin, Paris, Cambridge, London, Stuttgart, Leipzig, Göttingen, Jerusalem, and other cities. To make things worse, the most valuable manuscripts at these libraries are also most severely damaged because they were painted and re-painted with layers of different reagents.

The contemporary methods of scientific imaging are perhaps the last chance to recover textual information from these severely damaged palimpsests. The task, however, is a difficult one, and it is yet uncertain which methods are most promising. The imaging and analytic tools that can potentially be applied to the palimpsests are manifold, including multispectral imaging (MSI), scanning micro-X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (µXRF) and heat mapping, hyperspectral imaging (HSI), infrared reflectography, and Raman spectroscopy.