Analytical Studies On Making Techniques And Plaster Materials Used In Painting And Colored Drawing Of Ancient Wooden Architectural Buildings

Chinese traditional architectural painting and colored drawing is a very valuable part of the ancient architectural heritage, and it is also a brilliant part of global architectural art history. From ancient to date, a set of painting and colored drawing making techniques was explored and summarized, making some oldest paintings well preserved for hundreds of years, so the traditional techniques are obviously scientific and reliable. However, due to various reasons, the level of traditional ancient architecture maintenance techniques which have passed down for many years, now has a tendency to decline or even lost. Therefore, it is important to analyze the making techniques and materials of ancient painting and colored drawing. The analysis can provide a scientific basis for remedy of ancient painting and colored drawing, and maximize the use of traditional techniques and materials in construction following the principle of "Retaining the Historic Condition of Heritage Sites".However, only little published information is available on techniques and plaster materials used by ancient Chinese artists to decorate wooden architectural buildings. Therefore, based on deep investigation, abundant literature, and lots of experiments, using a variety of analytical instruments such as X-ray diffraction analyzer, X-ray fluorescence analyzer, thermal analyzer, scanning electron microscopy, optical microscopes, as well as elementary analyzer, the paper conducts systematical analysis on the qualitative and quantitative analysis methods of ancient techniques and primary plaster materials (other than rung oil) used in ancient painting and colored drawing for the first time, and establishes analysis method of the primary plaster materials, such as brick ash, lime, fiber, flour, blood, etc. Moreover, the paper also establishes the criterion of sampling methods and sampling volume for ancient architectural painting and colored drawings, and applies the criterion to the test and analysis on the samples from Bogda Khan Palace Museum in Mongolia, Jiayu Pass in Gansu Province, Summer Palace in Beijing and some ancient architectures in Shanxi Province.The experimental results show that: X-ray diffraction analysis, X-ray fluorescence analysis, combined with thermal analysis can be used to analyze inorganic matters qualitatively and quantitatively, indirectly reflecting the age information of samples; microscope can be used to identify the cotton and the flax according to their fibrous structural differences; the property that starch can be turned blue by iodine is useful for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the starch in the ancient samples; the blood identification methods of medical jurisprudence can be applied to test the samples of short period; the crude protein content can determined by elementary analysis. Among all the methods, thermal analysis and elemental analysis have the characters of micro samples and high accuracy, so they are very applicable to the analysis of painting and colored drawing.