Questions about faked artwork today provide a useful context for introducing analytical methods in both non-science and chemistry major courses. Instrumental multivariate analyses are ubiquitous in chemistry, but time or budget constraints often leave students with inadequate “real” data sets. A set of experiments are presented that use non-destructive, optic-fiber reflectance spectrometers and a novel, low cost pyrolysis interface for chromatography or spectroscopy. Its application to the analysis of works of art is described here for the first time.
Brasuel et al. (Tue,) studied this question.