How can pigment analysis reveal that a painting is a forgery?

Pigment analysis is a vital tool in technical art examination because it provides objective, scientific evidence regarding the materials used in a painting, which can be compared against the known practices of a specific artist or historical period.1

A painting may be identified as a forgery through pigment analysis in the following ways:

• Anachronistic Materials: Forgers often inadvertently use modern synthetic pigments that were not available during the time the work was supposedly created. For example, the presence of titanium white—a 20th-century product—in a painting attributed to an earlier master like Rembrandt immediately signals a fraud, as artists of that era would have used white lead.1
• Synthetic vs. Natural Pigments: Many historical colors were derived from ground natural minerals, such as lapis lazuli for blue or malachite for green. If analysis reveals that a work uses cheaper, modern synthetic chemicals instead of the traditional minerals expected for that period, it suggests the work is not authentic.1
• Spectrographic Testing: When only a tiny sample is available, experts can use spectrographic analysis to identify the specific elements present in the paint. By burning a minute sample, they can record the spectrum of the emitted light to determine the relative percentages of elements, revealing if the composition is consistent with the artist’s genuine works.1