Chinese scroll painting is one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world. These paintings are characterized by brushwork, pigment category and painting style. In order to nondestructively investigate the techniques of large-scale Chinese scroll paintings, an automatic hyperspectral scanning system, composed of a hyperspectral camera, a halogen light source, an automatic scanning platform, data processing software and a reference spectral library, was set up. This system was applied to the study of Portrait of Bazalibudala Arhat, an important Chinese scroll painting, along with macroscopic X-ray fluorescence technique.
As a result, sketches and outlines of the patterns were detected. Pigments identified included azurite, malachite, white lead, cinnabar, ochre, gold and carbon black and were mapped to the painting. Furthermore, quantitative maps of pigments were obtained, which provided a vital clue in investigating the painters’ craft practice for the use of pigments.
