The Mobile Lab is Back in Verona to Assess ‘Palimpsests in Danger’

2 February 2024

Photo: Ivan Shevchuk

OCT examination of the Gaius palimpsest

For the second time in three months, researchers from the CSMC’s Mobile Lab have travelled to the Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona to analyse valuable damaged palimpsests. They take part in an international endeavour to recover information from chemically treated manuscripts.

Researchers from the CSMC’s Mobile Lab are currently back in Verona to analyse valuable palimpsests. In the 18th and 19th century, these palimpsests – among them the Institutiones of Gaius, the only surviving classical Roman lawbook – were severely damaged by scholars in an attempt to make them legible. Currently, experts from all over Europe are trying out several modern imaging techniques to reconstruct the hidden texts as part of the one-and-a-half-year project ‘Palimpsests in Danger: Recovering Information from Chemically Treated Manuscripts’. The project started in October 2023 with a first phase of imaging.

Back then, micro-X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (µXRF) proved to be particularly effective. Our researchers were able to completely restore the undertext on some folios of the manuscript and thus make it accessible to scholars. However, many questions remain. For example, in one of the codices a peculiar elemental composition of the ink was detected during the first series of experiments. The researchers are therefore now trying to characterise the chemical make-up of the ink and the origin of elements detected using X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy. In this process, they work together with Piotr Targowski and Magdalena Kowalska from the Institute of Physics and Magdalena Iwanicka from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. They developed a transportable Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) system which might allow a 2D visualisation of the topography of the original undertexts.

The ‘Palimpsests in Danger Project’ is organised by the UCLA Library, the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL), and the Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona. The CSMC, the Lazarus Project of the University of Rochester, and the Center for Imaging Science of Rochester Institute of Technology are project partners. The results of ‘Palimpsests in Danger’ will be made available on the UCLA Library Digital Collections website. The processed images will be described and indexed, so that they are findable and searchable for researchers worldwide and accessible in the long term.