Manuscript Cultures
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.
‘Palimpsests in Danger: Recovering Information from Chemically Treated Manuscripts’, an 18-month pilot study managed by the UCLA Library, the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL), and the Fondazione Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona, attempts to figure out if and how the texts on these palimpsests can be restored. In order to do so, imaging experts from Europe and the US have been invited to apply the methods they specialise in on the material. Among them are members of the CSMC’s Mobile Lab, Kyle Ann Huskin, Ivan Shevchuk, and Greg Nehring, who have been highly successful in recovering damaged or erased writing using the MSI technique on numerous occasions in the past. Currently, the team is at the Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona for an initial imaging session (watch a recent report on their efforts on Italian television here). Other participants include the Lazarus Project of the University of Rochester, the Center for Imaging Science of Rochester Institute of Technology (CIS), and the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies of Durham University (IMEMS).
The pilot study proceeds in several stages. In the current first phase, participants collaborate to analyse and compare data collected by both chemical analysis and imaging to determine best practices for imaging the damaged palimpsests. In the second phase, another imaging session will test and refine the recommendations by imaging a larger selection of folios. Processed images from both phases will be made available on the UCLA Library Digital Collections website. The results of the project will be maintained and accessible long-term and will be described and indexed, so that they are findable and searchable for researchers worldwide.