A POISONOUS yellow pigment used by painters for hundreds of years is helping
art buffs to date works of art more accurately than before.
“Naples yellow” is a pigment made of lead antimony oxide that artists have
used since the 1600s. Oil paints containing it are toxic, but over the years,
manufacturers have tweaked the physical structure of the pigment to make it
safer, cheaper and more stable.
Joris Dik and his colleagues at the University of Amsterdam looked at the
structure of Naples yellow in over 100 European paintings of known age. They
bombarded the paint samples with electrons…
