Annalisa Chieli
Postdoctoral/Projecte ERC LArcHer-SERP
Short biography
Annalisa Chieli is a Chemist specialized in Heritage Science. She obtained a PhD in Chemical Sciences (2014-2018) at the SMAArt Centre and CNR-ISTM (currently CNR-Scitec) institutions, based at the Department of Chemistry, Biology and Biotechnology of the University of Perugia (Italy), following the curriculum: Materials and Methods for Environment and Cultural Heritage Protection. During the PhD, she worked on the understanding of the photophysical and photochemical processes causing the fading of three classes of fugitive pictorial pigments, namely Geranium lakes, Cadmium based pigments, and Prussian blue. In the same department, she performed her first year of postdoc (2018-2019), working on the implementation of the use of non-invasive VIS-NIR hyperspectral imaging technique in reflectance and emission for the analyses of painted surfaces.
During these years (2014 – 2019), she participated in several MOLAB trans-national accesses within the IPERIONCH.IT and IPERIONCH.EU European projects, taking part in many non-invasive analytical spectroscopic campaigns around Europe among museums, private collections, etc., as a member of Perugia (Italy) MOLAB team.
Since February 2020, she is involved in the ERC project “LArcHer: breaking barriers between Science and Heritage approaches to Levantine Rock Art through Archaeology, Heritage Science and IT” at the University of Barcelona. She deals with the scientific research related to the multiple aspects involved in Levantine rock art production: identification of materials, pictorial pigments, paint mixtures and techniques, and their conservation.
Research interests
Always involved in studying materials of interest in the figurative arts, Annalisa Chieli has a solid spectroscopic formation mainly focused on the utilization and improvement of non-invasive and non-destructive analytical methods for studying polychromatic surfaces, with particular reference to the identification of pigments and their alteration mechanisms. The research activity is built on multi-analytical and multi-scale approaches aiming to solve both diagnostic and conservation issues: namely, i) to identify artworks’ constitutive materials and ii) to understand their alteration processes in order to contribute to their conservation strategies. During her path of academic education and research, she acquired a strong knowledge of the use of different spectroscopic techniques in their portable and benchtop configuration for the analyses of artworks materials and their degradation processes, namely X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, UV-Vis absorption, and emission spectroscopy, both in transmission and reflectance configurations, micro/Raman spectroscopy, X FTIR spectroscopy, VIS-NIR hyperspectral imaging, among others.
Selected publications
Chieli, A., Vendrell, M., Roldan, C., Giraldez, P., Domingo, I., Characterizing paint technologies and recipes in Levantine and Schematic rock art: El Carche site as a case study (Jalance, Spain) PLoS ONE 2022, 17(8 August), e0271276
Chieli, A., Miliani, C., Degano, I., Sabatini, F., Tognotti, P., Romani, A., New insights into the fading mechanism of Geranium lake in painting matrix, Dyes and Pigments, 2020, 181, 108600
Monico L., Cartechini L., Rosi F., Chieli A., Grazia C., De Meier S., Nuyts G., Vanmeert F., Janssens K., Cotte M., De Nolf W., Falkenberg G., Anca Sandu I. C., Storevik Tveit E., Mass J., Pereira de Freitas R., Romani A. and Miliani C., Probing the chemistry of CdS paints in The Scream by in situ noninvasive spectroscopies and synchrotron radiation x-ray techniques, Science Advances, 2020, Vol. 6, no. 20, eaay3514, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aay3514
Dooley K.A., Chieli A., Romani A., Legrand S., Miliani C., Janssens K., and Delaney J. K., Molecular Fluorescence Imaging Spectroscopy for Mapping Low Concentrations of Red Lake Pigments: Van Gogh’s Painting The Olive Orchard, Angewandte Chemie, 2020, DOI:10.1002/ange.201915490
Chieli A., Sanyova J., Doherty B., Brunetti B.G., and Miliani C., “Chromatographic and spectroscopic identification and recognition of ammoniacal cochineal dyes and pigments”, Spectrochim. Acta A Mol. Biomol. Spectrosc., 2016, 162 pp. 86-92, doi: 10.1016/j.saa.2016.03.007.