The Pendant portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit are a pair of full-length wedding portraits by Rembrandt. Formerly owned by the Rothschild family, they became joinedly owned by the Louvre Museum and the Rijksmuseum in 2015 after both museums managed to contribute half of the purchase price of €160 million, a record for works by Rembrandt.
X-rays are a type of radiation which can be used for analysing aspects of a work of art not visible to the naked eye.
X-rays can pass through most solid objects, but they are obstructed by certain materials. The heavier the atoms of a substance, the more resistance it has to X-rays.
An X-radiograph records the areas of a work where the X-rays have been impeded (these areas appear white when printed as a photographic positive). Pigments containing heavy metals such as lead and mercury show up, as do the nails used in the construction of a painting’s support.
X-radiographs are useful for revealing changes that may have occurred at different stages in the development of a painting; losses to the paint layer show as dark areas. X-radiographs can be difficult to interpret because the image shows all of the layers of the work superimposed.
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