TOWARDS THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A RAMAN DATABASE OF EARLY EUROPEAN PORCELAIN

This work presents an update on the research work that is being carried out towards the establishment of a database and of an experimental protocol for the Raman analysis of porcelain. Several studies published since 2001 have in fact demonstrated how the Raman spectra of a porcelain object can be obtained in a non-invasive way to determine body and glaze composition, making it possible to determine the type and often the provenance of the porcelain. Many early European porcelain productions have been characterized by Raman spectroscopy so far, and a large corpus of spectroscopic data exists, which now needs systematization, in order to identify “reference” Raman signatures for each manufacture and possibly to standardize the experimental procedure for this kind of analyses. Up to now a similar need has been fulfilled mainly for the Raman spectra of single minerals, pigments and binders. This paper reports spectroscopic data acquired on 18th century porcelain objects from Capodimonte (Italy) and Buen Retiro (Spain), using them as examples of possible database entries.