Technology is everywhere around us and we have come to expect that for every question there is a machine or a scientific procedure, which will give us the answer.

Many people are under the impression that paintings can be authenticated using technology of one kind or another.

The quick answer is no.

There is no device, no scanner, no test, no special photography, which will tell you whether your painting is an authentic Picasso, a genuine Rembrandt or by anyone else.

Some clients call us after they have spent a few thousand dollars on pigment analysis, infrared photographs and electron emission radiographs.

They still do not know if they have a Renoir, a Carreno or a Benjamin West.

Scientific tests do mostly two things:

• They tell us if there is something underneath the top coat of paint. For example, a preparatory sketch.
   
• They give us cut-off dates. For example, Prussian blue did not exist before 1725. If a painting contains Prussian blue, it was executed after 1725 or restored with Prussian blue after 1725.

While this type of information can be very useful in some cases, it falls very far off from telling us who executed a particular painting.

The situation is the same with dendrochronology and dendrospectrochronology. It will help determine the approximate age of a wood panel but it could have been painted or repainted at any time after the tree was cut.

We frequently receive questions about C-14 radiocarbon dating. The problems with it are that it does not work for objects under 350 years old, it lacks precision in the time range, and there are considerable difficulties in performing accurate calibration and testing.

"Those involved in radiocarbon dating should be alert to the various possible sources of error and recognize that the precision quoted on a date may be quite unrealistic" Gordon Pearson. "Precise 14C Measurement by LS Counting."  (Radiocarbon 21(1):1-22)

For practical easel paintings authentication purposes radiocarbon dating is unreliable in the extreme. For this reason, it is almost never used.

Other scientific dating methods such as potassium argon or thermoluminescence or either inapplicable to paintings; they only work on ceramics; or they provide date ranges in the hundreds or thousands of years. For the most part, they cannot be used to date paintings accurately.

DNA has been mentioned but in most instances we do not have body parts of the artist to check if a hair caught in the paint belonged to him, or to the tail of the weasel the paintbrush was made from.

Attempts have been made to authenticate paintings based on fingerprint impressions in the paint (as opposed to the oily finger-prints we leave when we touch something. These have long evaporated). The difficulty lies, among many others, in obtaining clean sample prints from artists who, for the most part, have been dead for decades and centuries.

Scientific tests provide some information, some cut-off dates, and particularly serve to reveal forgeries because new materials are easy to spot and identify.

Most tests tell us what something is not, as opposed to what it is.

There is no science and no technology, which authenticates paintings by itself.

Authenticating paintings requires a combination of approaches, methods, examinations and research, which are not the same for all paintings, and among which scientific tests are only one tool.

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