 Recent advances in the analysis of paintings are leading to a revolution in how we look at art, the people who made it and, perhaps surprisingly, the social and economic climates in which they worked. By looking in detail at the material structure of paintings we can learn much about the choices artists made, why they made them and how and where their materials came from. An essential strand in these developments is the application of various forms of microscopy. This one-day meeting will look at the forefront of this field, from Roman wall paintings to the current fight against forgery, from simple surface microscopy to the most advanced laser Raman analysis, from why an artist might paint the way he did to what the choice of materials tells us about when and where the picture was painted.
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