The tesserae can have a smooth or corrugated surface and are available in. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s) author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law. Aureo is handmade by fusing together sheets of glass coated with thin gold leaf. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023. We observe for the Byzantine period the use of a Byzantine gold and of gold supposedly from different stages of recycling, and we suggest the use of Umayyad and Abbasid gold for the production of Islamic tesserae. To gain insight into the possible origin of the gold used in the production of tesserae containing gold leaf less than 0.

Although trace element composition of gold used in the concerned period is only available for coins, by comparing the amounts of Pt contained in the tesserae and in the coins we show that Roman tesserae are made from Roman gold, as described in the documentary sources. From the Greek for 'four sided,' the term is said to have first ben used by Pliny when referring to pavements made of such cubes. However, these alloys are identical to those used to make gold leaf for gilding, because plastic deformation requires the use of gold alloys with high ductility and malleability. Tessera (plural: tesserae pronounced TESS sa ra TESS saree): an individual tile in a mosaic, usually formed in the shape of a cube. Data obtained by double-dispersive XRF (D 2XRF) and µXRF for fourth–ninth-century mosaics decorating nine Eastern and Western religious buildings show that the Eastern and Western tesserae are made from different alloys. As Pt and Au have adjacent fluorescence energies, we tested the most challenging situation, when Pt is present in very low concentrations in gold. 8 In 537, he completed the construction of a new patriarchal cathedral in the capital city of Constantinople that would be the global center of the Orthodox Church: the Hagia Sophia. Using this protocol, trace element analysis is achieved with detection limits of 1–6 mg/kg. Much of the background is of yellow glass tesserae, which would have helped to light up the cavern in the torch - light.89 It has been suggested that gold. The reign of Justinian I in the 6th century coincided with the first golden age of the Byzantine Empire. To gain insight into the possible origin of the gold used in the production of tesserae containing gold leaf less than 0.5 µm thick placed between two layers of glass, we propose a non-destructive synchrotron radiation (SR) XRF protocol based on sequential analysis under optimised analytical conditions. UMR 8233, MONARIS, CNRS-Sorbonne Université, 4 Place Jussieu, 75252, Paris, FranceĪrt, Archéologie et Patrimoine (UR AAP), Université de Liège, 10 Allée du Six-Août, 4000, Liège, Belgiumīundesanstalt für Materialforschung-und prüfung (BAM), Richard-Willstätter Str 11, 12489, Berlin, Germany

Guerra 1 a, Elisabetta Neri 2 and Martin Radtke 3

Gold tesserae