Adnkronos (Adnkronos) – A CT scan at Arcimboldo. "The Greengrocer," a famous 500th-century painting housed in the Pinacoteca del Museo Civico Ala Ponzone in Cremona, is the special "patient" X-rayed at Humanitas University by Andrea Laghi, a professor at the Milanese university and director of the Diagnostics Department at the IRCCS Istituto Clinico Humanitas. A super-CT scan, typically used for clinical research on the heart, brain, lungs, and tumors, will help reveal the secrets that, according to experts, the work still holds.
Specifically, "the aim of the scientific investigations," states Mario Marubbi, curator at the Pinacoteca Ala Ponzone, "will be to determine the technical and executive process used in its creation, in order to verify the hypothesis that 'The Gardener' is the first composite head created by Arcimboldo. The tests also aim to resolve questions regarding the current stratification of the support, attributable to previous conservation interventions, analyze the palette, and determine the nature of the materials used by the painter."
Painted between 1587 and 1590 by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the painting, an oil on panel (35,8 × 24,2 cm), depicts a still life of vegetables in a bowl which, when turned upside down 180 degrees, transforms into the comical image of the Greengrocer.
The Cremona Museum's work is the only reversible head by Arcimboldo held in an Italian museum, which turned to Humanitas University to uncover previously unseen details. This phase of investigation, using cutting-edge instrumentation, Humanitas explains, is part of a broader diagnostic campaign being undertaken jointly with the University of Pavia, specifically the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (Maria Pia Riccardi and Maya Musa) and the Department of Physics (Maddalena Patrini), with the scientific coordination of Mario A.
Lazzari and the operational coordination of art historian Raffaella Poltronieri. This initiative, based on a completely non-invasive investigation protocol, will complement the scientific studies conducted in 2007 by Mario Marubbi and Lazzari on the occasion of the exhibition "Arcimboldo (1526-1593)" held that year at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris and continued in 2008 at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
"The work was subjected to a photon-counting CT scan," Laghi describes, "which translates the energy of individual photons reaching the detector after interacting with the fabrics into an electrical signal. In this case, the paint layers and the panel. A key feature of the machine is its ability to achieve extremely high-precision resolution. This allowed us to acquire images of the work's layers, a fifth of a millimeter thick."
The machine that hosted 'L'Ortolano' – according to a statement – arrived at Humanitas thanks to Humanitas University and funding from Anthem, the project funded by the Ministry of University and Research as part of the National Complementary Plan to the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). Anthem was created to accelerate innovation in clinical research towards increasingly predictive and personalized medicine, with a particular focus on four areas with a high healthcare impact: heart, brain, lungs, and tumors.
The super CT scanner is located in the Proton Building at the IRCCS Istituto Clinico Humanitas in Rozzano, inaugurated this year as part of the hospital's thirtieth anniversary celebrations. This building, entirely dedicated to oncology care, houses the Clinical Trial Unit, where patients can access cutting-edge experimental therapies, and Proton Therapy, the most advanced form of high-precision radiotherapy for cancer treatment.
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