Van Gogh Painting Uncovered By New Xray Machine

Rolling back the centuries: Dr Karen Rickers, above, fires the accelerator

From The Telegraph:

A new technique promises to reveal hundreds of masterpieces hidden beneath later works. Harry de Quetteville reports

It amounts to the biggest single art find: a host of unseen works by masters old and new, from Rembrandt to Van Gogh and Picasso. But these works can't be seen on the walls of any gallery or museum. And they are hidden not in a safe or bank vault, but on canvases which the artists themselves painted over.

Now, however, scientists are employing a revolutionary technique to reveal these spectacular images. Using circular particle accelerators, hundreds of metres across, they fire Xrays 10,000 times more powerful than any hospital scan at the priceless paintings.

It is not the first time that art historians have employed science to peer beyond the façade of masterworks. Leonardo, Brueghel and Courbet are some of the many artists whose canvases are emerging as ultra-valuable palimpsests, where the original image has been muffled by over-eager restoration or concealed by over-painting.

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