KYRIAK KOSTANDI’S PAINTING TECHNIQUE THROUGH THE MULTI-ANALYTICAL STUDY BY OPTICAL AND PHYSICALCHEMICAL METHODS

Abstract

The article presents the results of technological research on ten Kyriak Kostandi paintings from the collection of Yuriy Balashov. The main attention was paid to establishing the signatures’ characteristics, the features of the painting’s supports, grounds, and the technique of the paint layers using optical and physics-chemical methods. The research showed that Kostandi did not always sign his paintings. The smallest study is signed by letters "K. K.", other paintings and studies are signed as "K. Kostandi" in black ink, iron-gall ink, or brown paint on a dry painting layer shortly after the painting was created. The portraits are painted mainly on plain weave fine-grained linen artists-primed canvases of various densities. One of the paintings is made on cotton canvas. The white single-layer grounds contain a mixture of animal glue and oil (or small amounts of oil) as binders. There were identified lead white and the mixture of lead white with chalk and blanc fixe as ground fillers. The unprimed hardwood panels or the cardboard were used as the supports for the studies. Portraits’ underdrawings were made with charcoal. The research in the transmitted IR light has shown a reworking of the portraits’ composition. The studies’ underdrawings were applied with a graphite pencil. Numerous corrections of the image details were revealed in the infrared range. It was determined oil as a paint binder by the IR spectroscopy method. The chronology of the works according to the input data was confirmed. The XRF analysis of paint layers revealed a tendency for the replacement of lead white by zinc white. Lead white was identified in the early 1880s painting. Zinc white and lead white admixture and zinc white with a small amount of lead white were found in paintings created from the 1890s to the first half of the 1910s. In further paintings, the pure zinc white was detected. The research has shown that cadmium yellow (cadmium sulfide), vermillion, viridian (hydrous oxide of chromium), and cobalt blue are typical for the artist's palette. The characteristic pigments of paint mixtures have been identified. The data obtained are important for art historians and museum curators and can be used to clarify the attribution of Kyriak Kostandi’s paintings.