RECENT APPLICATIONS TO THE STUDY OF ANCIENT INKS WITH THE FLORENCE EXTERNAL-PIXE FACILITY

In the first part of the paper, the specific advantages of external PI XE in the applications to the analysis of ancient inks are discussed t ogether with some problems in the quantitative analysis of the X-ray s pectra as far as low-Z elements are concerned, which however come out to be of minor relevance for a discrimination among different inks, wh ich is the main purpose of these investigations. In the second part, a few examples of the results we have recently obtained are illustrated . By detecting the ink composition we have been able to support attrib utions of several manuscripts, produced in central Italy from the 12th to the 15th century, to the same or different writers and periods. Wi thin this group of manuscripts, a substantial difference was detected between those of the 12th century and all the others, possibly showing a technological evolution in the ink-making procedures. Finally, we r eport on the latest results of our project for an ink-based chronologi cal reconstruction of undated documents by Galileo. By these results, such a project has now proved to have good chances of casting some lig ht on controversial dating problems of these documents.