The Louvre Sleuth

On the surface, Elisabeth Ravaud's job appears similar to that of other radiologists: she spends her days examining images for detailed information hidden from the naked eye. But her "patients" are not humans – they are priceless works of art from museums across France, including the famous Louvre in Paris. As the head of the radiographic facilities at the Laboratoire de Recherche des Musées de France, Ravaud's list of patients reads like an art lover's fantasy: Rembrandt, Renoir, Botticelli, Van Gogh.

Hidden Secrets

A slim, fine-boned woman with short dark hair, Ravaud is quiet and unassuming in person, but possesses the natural elegance associated with French women.

In a warren of offices and laboratories hidden beneath a wing of the Louvre, Ravaud and her colleagues examine dozens of works of art each year. Generally, a museum requests an X-ray of a painting or sculpture after visual examination and other techniques – including chemical analysis – suggest there is more to a picture than meets the eye. For example, a Louvre expert may see that the design of a painting does not correspond with the thickness of the paint, indicating that there may be another painting underneath, perhaps by a different artist.

On a typical day, Ravaud descends a small staircase hidden near the Porte des Lions entrance of the Louvre, located just a few steps from the Tuileries gardens. Before X-raying a work of art, Ravaud spends several hours reading the files on the piece and on the artist and looking at photographs of the painting. She sometimes compares these to photos of other paintings, either by the same artist or from the same period.

Taking the actual X-rays can consume up to half a day, depending on the size of the painting. Although most of the works that she images measure less than four square meters (43 square feet), some have been more than 20 square meters (215 square feet), which can be an obstacle. "We can only do plain film X-rays," says Ravaud. "It would be nice to do CT scans for some paintings or sculptures, but of course they wouldn't fit into the CT scanner, and they could be damaged."

The real challenge is interpreting the radiographic images of the art. Ravaud can spend entire days reviewing a single image, comparing what she sees on the viewbox with a photo of the painting and the history of the work. Although she normally deals with paintings with a verified history, occasionally she encounters misidentifications or even forgeries. "We are always learning something new when we X-ray a painting or sculpture," says Ravaud. "It's fascinating work."

X-rays can reveal startling information about an artist's technique. "With X-rays, we can unlock hidden secrets about a painting, a painter, or even the time in which he lived," says Ravaud. Earlier this year, Ravaud and her colleagues were able to solve a mystery surrounding a wax statue of Napoleon III on his horse. Wax sculptures tend not to survive very long because the material is fragile and extremely sensitive to temperature changes – too much heat and it melts and loses shape; too much cold and it becomes brittle and falls apart.

The statue, sculpted in 1870 by Alfred Jacquemart, was one of the few exceptions in the Louvre's collection – a wax sculpture that had retained its form and beauty. Radiographic analysis showed Jacquemart had employed an unusual method of creating the statue. The body of the horse was modeled around a metal rod. Metal also was used at other points in the statue, including in the horse's tail, which was molded around a large, bent, round-headed nail. These metallic substances appeared on the X-rays as opaque objects, whereas the wax was almost translucent. The radiographic findings led the researchers to conduct chromographic analysis on the sculpture. They learned the wax itself was a type of beeswax mixed with stearine and starch.

One of a Kind

Ravaud studied medicine at l'Hôpital Pitié-Salpétrière at the Université de Paris. She finished in 1983, and went on to do radiology training at l'Hôpital Tenon in Paris. Working as a hospital radiologist for more than 10 years honed her ability to analyze images. Ravaud left her hospital position in 1994. The stress of trying to negotiate the complex bureaucracy of the French healthcare system left her feeling burnt out and ready for a change. And, although not an artist herself, she had always loved art. She is still qualified to practice medicine, but since moving to the art world, she hasn't looked back.

As far as Ravaud knows, she is the only radiologist in the world working full-time with art. Occasionally, museums and galleries will have objects X-rayed at medical imaging centers (there have been several stories of doing CT scans of mummies), but specialized industrial X-ray equipment is needed to do this on a large scale. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, has an old X-ray machine, but no medical personnel to run it. When it is used, the imaging is done by conservators rather than radiologists.

Ravaud's services are in high demand from French museums; she has even had to add a sculpture specialist to the research team. "I now deal mostly with paintings and my colleague handles objects," she explains. "He is not a radiologist, but a photographer, so we have different ways of looking at images. Our two perspectives blend well together."

Ravaud's career is now taking off on another tangent. She is often called on to speak to art conservators from museums around the world, and she has appeared in numerous French and Asian television documentaries to talk about her work. "People take a keen interest in X-rays of paintings," says Ravaud. They, like Ravaud, are intrigued by the extent to which appearances can be deceiving – in paintings, as well as in people.

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