The study of artistic bronzes by infrared thermography: A review

The study of bronze statues obtained by the lost-wax casting method results of particular relevance from the artistic and historical points of view. In particular, the characterization of structural and subsurface elements of bronzes is very useful to gather insight concerning their preservation state and manufacturing process. For these purposes, infrared thermography has been successfully employed to investigate different kind of items of artistic bronzes, such as repairs, defects and inserts, providing also the possibility to perform the depth-resolved study of the observed subsurface features thanks to the possibility it also provides to evaluate the thermal transport properties of the investigated materials. In this work, the experimental configurations and the capabilities of such a technique have been reviewed. The state of the art of the results obtained by infrared thermography for the analysis of artistic bronzes is presented. It is thus shown that infrared thermography can be nowadays considered as a reliable and consolidated technique to map in a non-destructive way a wide spectrum of features of bronzes.