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Strange But True
Q: How many engineering jobs let you take a van Gogh
off the wall and hold it in your hands?
A: If you're both an electrical engineering professor
and a research fellow at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam,
like Cornell's C. Richard Johnson Jr., you just might do
this, says Susan Karlin of "IEEE Spectrum" magazine. A big
concern of his is "fraud and how to detect it." Is that
alleged van Gogh in hand authentic? Answering this can be
done with high-resolution imaging associated with signal-
processing algorithms that zero in at the brushstroke level.
Currently, Johnson's focus is on canvas thread counts--the
number of horizontal threads crossing a vertical line one
centimeter long--to identify paintings from the same roll of
canvas. This is telling for an artist who bought canvas in
rolls, as van Gogh often did. Radio-opaque material in an
X-ray helps reveal signature weave density. Johnson's team
is currently distributing the software free to museums.
For me, he says, this kind of research is "like having
a backstage pass. I go to conservation studios and can take
a van Gogh out of its frame and examine it."
Send questions to StrangeTrue@ameritech.net.
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