The degradation effects of artificial aging on the “true” pigment color of Byzantine iconography are thoroughly investigated in this work. For this purpose, a multi-material palette is fabricated, consisting of various popular egg-tempera pigments, while the original recipes from the literature are utilized in order to mimic the genuine art of Byzantine painters. Then, artificial aging procedures are appropriately employed to simulate environmental fluctuations in historical buildings, such as churches. A total of four time steps are investigated, including the initial condition, and pigments’ spectra in the ultraviolet/visible (UV/Vis) area are acquired in the diffuse reflectance mode at each individual step. Moreover, a color characterization procedure is realized via the quantification of lightness and saturation by means of the measured UV/Vis spectrum. The main objectives of this work are to determine the color stability, the type of color degradation, and generally the color response through time of the studied pigments. The extracted results indicate that a couple of pigments suffer severe color degradation while the majority present moderate darkening or discoloration.

中文翻译：

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由于拜占庭图像流行颜料的人工老化程序导致颜色退化的一致表征

这项工作彻底研究了人工老化对拜占庭图像的“真实”颜料颜色的降解影响。为此，制作了一种多材料调色板，由各种流行的蛋彩画颜料组成，同时利用文献中的原始配方来模仿拜占庭画家的真正艺术。然后，适当地采用人工老化程序来模拟历史建筑（例如教堂）中的环境波动。总共研究了四个时间步长，包括初始条件，并在每个单独的步骤中以漫反射模式获取紫外/可见光 (UV/Vis) 区域中的颜料光谱。而且，颜色表征程序是通过测量的 UV/Vis 光谱量化亮度和饱和度来实现的。这项工作的主要目标是确定所研究颜料的颜色稳定性、颜色退化的类型以及通常的颜色响应。提取的结果表明，有几种颜料会出现严重的颜色退化，而大多数会出现中度变暗或变色。