Wide-field Gloss Scanner Designed to Assess Appearance and Condition of Modern Paintings

Abstract

When one seeks to characterize the appearance of art paint-ings, color is the visual attribute that usually focuses most atten-tion: not only does color predominate in the reading of the pic-torial work, but it is also the attribute that we best know how to evaluate scientifically, thanks to spectrophotometers or imaging systems that have become portable and affordable, and thanks to the CIE color appearance models that allow us to convert the measured physical data into quantified visual values. However, for some modern paintings, the expression of the painter relies at least as much on gloss as on color; Pierre Soulages (1919-2022) is an exemplary case. This complicates considerably the characterization of the appearance of the paintings because the scientific definition of gloss, its link with measurable light quan-tities and the measurement of these light quantities over a whole painting are much less established than for color. This paper re-ports on the knowledge, challenges and difficulties of character-izing the gloss of painted works, by outlining the track of an im-aging system to achieve this.