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The Pigment Delusion
Paperback
Art Criticism & TheorySports General
ISBN13: 9781806056316
Publisher: Leonardo Pantoja
Published: Dec 8 2025
Pages: 354
Weight: 1.40
Height: 0.96 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The Pigment Delusion exposes one of the most uncomfortable truths in heritage science and art authentication: most scientific discoveries in art do not prove what they claim. They reject nothing, confirm very little, and yet are routinely presented as certainty.
Rooted in real cases of authentication, forgery, pigment analysis, and scientific technique, this book shows how heritage science frequently mistakes compatibility for confirmation, silence for absence, and statistical coincidence for authorship. Through forensic critique, it reveals how instruments like Raman, XRF, FTIR and AI-driven analysis are routinely misinterpreted, structurally biased, and often incapable of detecting what we claim they detect.
Moving from the fallacy of the single sample to the seductive force of the killer fact, The Pigment Delusion dismantles the illusion that modern science can deliver definitive answers about authenticity. Instead, it exposes a deeper epistemological problem: the desire for certainty itself.
This is not an attack on science. It is an unflinching examination of how science is applied-and misapplied-within museums, laboratories, and cultural institutions desperate for authoritative answers. The result is a powerful argument for intellectual humility: uncertainty is not failure; it is the condition of knowledge.
Clear, provocative, and grounded in rigorous reasoning, The Pigment Delusion challenges what the public, the market, and even professionals believe science can tell us about art. It replaces confident assertions with honest doubt, showing why the truth about cultural heritage is more complex-and more interesting-than the stories we wish were true.
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