New Proposed Solution for the Safeguard of Artworks

In the field of Cultural Heritage, the safeguard of artworks contends new and complex problems linked not only to conservative condition, maintenance, etc. but also to the introduction of fakes and problems linked to this aspects. In last years, dating and authentication studies, mainly based on historicalartistic-stylistic studies, have been supported by scientific world both through identification of materials and artistic techniques and proposing new anti-counterfeiting marks. Unfortunately, these solutions do not always solve doubts about counterfeits and the fight against fakes continues developing further research aimed to discover and to prevent the introduction of forgery. The current study shows a new possible solution in order to safeguard the artworks, creating an artwork’s identity card that can be useful to control replacement of artworks, especially for paintings and during Fine Arts transportation. During the centuries, the great interest, which has always been aroused by Art commerce, has caused often an increase of the demand for art-works that changes according to fashions and times. For this reason, the introduction on the market of art-fakes or counterfeit works is unfortunately a common practice that has continued up nowadays. Among the new form of sly Art-thefts, the replacement of original paintings with perfect copies is one of most difficult to recognize. Moreover, considering that a painting or a mobile artwork increases its value also in correlation to the number of art-exhibitions around the world [BG06], [Goo06], [LL06], in which it takes part, artworks’ handling can stand up for the masterpieces’ substitution, increasing the problems linked to fine art transportation. In the last years, scientists have tried to propose new solutions for the safeguard of artworks (i.e., Elettra-Synchrotron light source mark) [BBD12], but the impossibilities to mark always surface or to apply tags, barcodes, RFID systems, etc. suggests to look for other possible solutions. The study, developed in a recent Ph.D. research [Vol13b], could be considered among new possible solution proposed to prevent forgeries and unpleasant replacements: through a multi-analytical approach, it is possible to identify artworks’ characteristics that are helpful to establish the uniqueness of a particular artwork. In addition to draw up a sort of “artwork’s identity card”, these characteristics are useful to support authentication and dating studies integrating historical-artistic-stylistic information, designed for false artworks’ identification. The features that are collected in a particular database are searched among the morphology of