Química aplicada à investigação da autenticidade de obras de arte: uma revisão bibliográfica

Abstract

The forgery of artistic and cultural heritage objects operates under a very simple idea: to produce a piece and sell it as if it belongs to another author or came from another distant time or place; making a profit over someone else's name or over the appeal of exotic/foreign cultures. It has been known that the practice of forgery it's extremely old: ever since the invention of currency there's record of faked and counterfeited goods. In the modern era, as the market for relics and artwork grew, the forgery of this type of goods gained traction as a consequence of the enormous amounts of money involved in these transactions and the lack of transparency inherent to the art market. Professional artists and art historians do their best to keep fakes from being commercialized by making artists' artwork catalogs, analysis of the techniques used by the author and its coherence to historical evidence, alongside other endeavors; unfortunately to moderate success, thanks to the volume of suspicious works and fine quality of some forgeries, among other limitations. In this context, chemistry appears as complementary to the investigation of art forgery, offering a less subjective point of view, due to the robust scientific basis of the results obtained in the instrumental analyses employed. This work aims to present examples of how chemistry is used to detect forgeries in artistic, historical, and cultural objects; introducing techniques employed in forensic studies and their pros and cons, by showing case studies, with the objective to share uncommon applications of commonly used analysis techniques, valuing forensic science and its interdisciplinarity, revealing the importance of investing in science and technology to fight crime.