Non-destructive Analyses of 16th Century Printed Book Osorio with the Colorful Fore-edge Miniatures

In our study we are trying to illuminate the palette used by the artist who decorated the fore-edge of the Middle Age printed book description of the military campaign of the Spanish king Emanuel Hieronymus Osorio and try to give a temporal boundary on the moment of their creation. Our experiments show that a pigment palette is a common one for the period between 16th and 19th century. Several pigments were identified, like vermilion and minium, white lead and massicot. Further, we identified the ink used for the book cover inscriptions. Three complementary, non-invasive spectroscopic techniques were used: micro-Raman spectroscopy, PIXE spectroscopy and UV-VIS FORS spectroscopy. The challenges which occurred during the study are presented, such as the positioning of the book underneath the microscope or even the fiber optic probe holder, the roughness of the fore-edge surface and the thinness of the color layers.