Picture yourself standing in front of a painting. The colours have faded a little. The canvas has aged. You see exactly what the artist left you — or so you think. Beneath that surface, sometimes just a few millimetres of dried pigment away, there may be an entirely different world. A hidden portrait. A discarded composition. A story the artist painted over and never meant for anyone to see.

This is not a hypothetical. It is the daily reality of the research being done by one of the most quietly remarkable scientists working in cultural heritage today.

Jeroen Dik is a Dutch materials scientist and Professor of Materials in Art and Archaeology at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. His career has been built on a single driving idea: that every painting is also a physical object, and that the chemistry and physics locked inside its layers hold information that no eye, no matter how trained, can extract alone.

Through a combination of cutting-edge imaging technologies and deep scientific knowledge, Dik has spent years revealing the secrets hidden inside some of the world’s most iconic artworks — including works by Vincent van Gogh and Rembrandt van Rijn. His discoveries have been covered by BBC News, National Geographic, and The Guardian. His methods have changed how museums approach conservation, authentication, and restoration.

This article takes a thorough look at who Jeroen Dik is, how he works, what he has found, and why it all matters far beyond the walls of any single gallery.

Who Is Jeroen Dik? Background, Education, and the Path to TU Delft

A Scientist With an Eye for Art

Jeroen Dik grew up in the Netherlands, a country whose cultural heritage is inseparable from painting. From Rembrandt to Vermeer to Van Gogh, Dutch art history runs deep. It would be difficult to grow up surrounded by that legacy without developing some curiosity about what makes those works so enduring — and Dik channelled that curiosity in a direction very few people have.

Rather than studying art history in the traditional sense, he pursued materials science. This is the discipline that looks at the structure, composition, and behaviour of physical substances — from metals and ceramics to polymers and, as it turned out, pigments and paint layers. It gave him a way of seeing artworks not just as cultural artefacts but as complex material systems that could be measured, mapped, and understood at a molecular level.

He went on to complete his doctoral research with a focus on the chemistry of historical painting materials. That decision to combine art history with hard science placed him in a rare category of researcher — one who could speak the language of the conservation studio and the university laboratory with equal fluency.

Joining Delft University of Technology

TU Delft is one of Europe’s most respected institutions for engineering and applied sciences. It is the kind of place where disciplines meet and productive collisions happen. For Dik, it was the right environment.

He joined TU Delft and eventually became a full professor, holding the title of Professor of Materials in Art and Archaeology. His department works specifically on developing non-invasive and minimally invasive methods to examine cultural heritage objects — methods that allow deep analysis without causing any harm to the works themselves.

The interdisciplinary nature of TU Delft suited his approach perfectly. His research brought together physicists, chemists, conservators, and art historians working toward the same goal. That kind of collaboration, across fields that do not always talk to each other, is part of what has made his outputs so significant.

He has described his philosophy plainly: art and science should not be treated as separate domains. When they work together, researchers can build what he calls a full “biography” of an artwork — tracking where its materials came from, how the artist applied them, and what has happened to the object in the centuries since.

The Science Behind the Secrets — Methods Jeroen Dik Uses to See Beneath the Surface

Why Old Methods Were Not Good Enough

Before researchers like Jeroen Dik pushed the field forward, studying the internal structure of a painting was a genuinely difficult problem. The most direct approach — taking a small physical sample from the canvas — was also the most destructive. Even a micro-sample the size of a pinhead could, in theory, cause damage to a work worth millions and irreplaceable to human culture. Museums were, quite reasonably, reluctant to allow it except in exceptional circumstances.

Standard X-ray radiography offered a non-destructive alternative, but it had clear limits. It could reveal broad density differences in a canvas — useful for detecting certain underpaintings — but it could not isolate individual pigments or distinguish cleanly between layers painted at different times. The detail simply was not there.

The gap between what researchers wanted to know and what existing tools could tell them was large. Jeroen Dik dedicated much of his career to closing it.

Macro X-Ray Fluorescence Scanning (MA-XRF): The Core Tool

The method most associated with his work is macro X-ray fluorescence scanning, commonly written as MA-XRF. It has become the most important tool in technical art history over the past two decades, and Dik has been central to developing and popularising its use.

Here is how it works. An X-ray beam is directed at the painting. When that beam strikes the atoms in the paint layers, it excites them. As those atoms settle back to their normal state, they emit fluorescent energy — and crucially, each chemical element emits at its own characteristic frequency. Lead emits at a different frequency from mercury. Mercury differs from copper. Copper differs from arsenic.

A detector placed near the painting captures all of these signals as the scanner moves across the canvas. A computer then maps the signals to their positions on the surface, producing a detailed elemental map of every layer — including the ones buried beneath decades or centuries of overpainting.

The result is extraordinary. Researchers can see pigments that are completely invisible to the naked eye. They can distinguish between a first layer of paint, a revision made the following week, and a totally different composition painted over years later. And they can do all of this without touching the artwork, without removing a single flake of paint, without causing any damage whatsoever.

Synchrotron Radiation-Based XRF: Taking It Further

For some projects, standard MA-XRF does not provide enough resolution or penetrating power. In those cases, Dik’s team has used synchrotron radiation-based XRF — a more powerful variant that uses large particle accelerators, called synchrotrons, as the X-ray source.

The synchrotron beam is far more intense than anything a laboratory instrument can produce. It penetrates upper paint layers more cleanly, causing less distortion in the measurements coming from deeper layers. It also allows faster scanning of larger areas, which matters when you are trying to map an entire canvas at high resolution.

This is the technique that Dik’s team used in their landmark 2008 study, published in the journal Analytical Chemistry — work that, as the next section covers, produced one of the most widely discussed discoveries in modern art science.

Supporting Technologies That Complete the Picture

MA-XRF and synchrotron XRF do not work alone. Jeroen Dik and his collaborators draw on a wider suite of techniques that each contribute different kinds of information.

Infrared reflectography works by detecting infrared radiation reflected from the painting. Many drawing materials used by Old Masters — charcoal, chalk, certain inks — absorb infrared strongly, while the paint layers above them often allow it to pass through. The result is that infrared imaging can reveal underdrawings: the preliminary sketches and outlines artists made before applying paint. These are invaluable for understanding how a work was planned and how the artist’s thinking evolved during the painting process.

X-radiography maps the overall density of materials across the canvas. It is particularly good at picking up lead white, a pigment used extensively by earlier painters that absorbs X-rays strongly. Regions of high density often correspond to thickly applied highlights or earlier compositions. It provides a broad structural picture that complements the more chemically specific data from XRF scanning.

3D surface scanning works differently again. Rather than looking beneath the surface, it maps the surface itself at very high resolution. This allows researchers to study the physical texture of brushstrokes — the actual three-dimensional ridges and grooves left by the artist’s hand. Combined with chemical analysis, it builds a remarkably complete physical record of how a painting was made.

Together, these tools give Dik’s team a multi-layered view of any painting they study. Each method answers different questions, and the answers build on each other to produce something far richer than any single technique could provide.

Landmark Discoveries That Changed Our Understanding of Masterpieces

The Hidden Face Inside Van Gogh’s Patch of Grass

No discovery associated with Jeroen Dik has drawn more public attention than the one published in Analytical Chemistry in 2008. It centred on a painting by Vincent van Gogh called Patch of Grass, completed in 1887 — a bright, seemingly straightforward landscape painted mostly in greens and blues.

Art historians had long suspected that something lay beneath. Van Gogh was known to reuse his own canvases frequently. He worked fast, produced enormous quantities of work in a short career, and often found himself short of materials. Experts estimate that as many as one-third of his early period paintings conceal an earlier composition underneath. The question was always: what exactly is there, and can we see it properly?

Dik led an international team that included researchers from the University of Antwerp in Belgium and the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron facility in Hamburg, Germany. They took Patch of Grass to the synchrotron, subjected it to high-intensity XRF mapping, and found what they were looking for with extraordinary clarity.

Beneath the bright Parisian landscape was a portrait of a woman — a provincial Dutch woman with a covered head, rendered in the warm browns and reds of Van Gogh’s earlier style. The face was detailed. The features were clear. Historians believe Van Gogh encountered some of the older portrait paintings he had given to his brother, found them old-fashioned compared to the work he was doing in Paris, and simply painted over them.

The significance went beyond the discovery itself. This was the first time synchrotron radiation-based XRF mapping had been applied to a painting, and it proved that the technique could visualise hidden compositions with unprecedented detail — far beyond what conventional X-ray radiography could achieve. The study became a landmark reference in cultural heritage science and attracted global media coverage from outlets including BBC News, National Geographic, and The Guardian.

Rembrandt: Reading the Revisions

The work of Rembrandt van Rijn has also been the subject of analysis using Dik’s methods, in collaboration with institutions including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis in The Hague — two of the world’s great collections of Dutch Golden Age painting.

Rembrandt was a painter who revised constantly. Preliminary sketches, compositional changes made mid-painting, areas repainted after reflection — his canvases hold a record of a restless and evolving creative intelligence. Through infrared reflectography and XRF scanning, researchers have been able to trace those revisions in detail, understanding not just what Rembrandt painted but how he thought through his compositions as he worked.

These findings matter to art historians and conservators alike. Knowing where and how a painting was changed helps conservation teams understand which elements are original to the first phase of work and which are later interventions — by Rembrandt himself, by later restorers, or sometimes by other hands entirely.

Authentication and the Detection of Forgeries

One of the most practically important applications of the techniques developed by Dik’s team is in authentication. The art market is not always honest, and paintings are misattributed — accidentally or deliberately — with real financial and cultural consequences.

Chemical fingerprinting through XRF provides a powerful check. Pigments were not always available throughout history. Certain blue compounds were not synthesised until the nineteenth century. Certain white pigments changed in composition at particular points in time. If a painting supposedly from the seventeenth century contains a pigment that was not invented until 1830, the chemical evidence is definitive. No amount of visual argument overrides it.

By building detailed elemental maps of works under investigation, Dik and his collaborators have given museums and collectors a scientific basis for authentication decisions that previously rested entirely on expert opinion — opinion that, however informed, can always be contested.

Digital Reconstruction: Seeing Paintings as They Once Were

Another area where this research has yielded remarkable results is in digital reconstruction. Centuries of exposure to light, oxygen, humidity, and atmospheric pollutants have altered the appearance of historic paintings significantly. Colours that were vivid in the seventeenth century have shifted, faded, or darkened. Varnishes applied during restoration have yellowed. The painting you see in a gallery today may look quite different from what the artist intended.

By analysing the original pigments still present in lower, protected layers and combining that data with knowledge of how those pigments age, researchers can create digital visualisations of how a work appeared when it first left the studio. These reconstructions are valuable for education, for exhibition design, and for guiding restoration decisions. They answer a question that has always been fascinating: what did this actually look like when it was new?

Impact on Museums, Conservators, and the Wider World of Cultural Heritage

Partnerships With the World’s Great Institutions

The research led by Jeroen Dik does not stay in the laboratory. It has direct, practical relationships with some of the most significant cultural institutions on the planet. The Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, the Mauritshuis, the Louvre in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have all been involved in collaborative projects.

These partnerships work in both directions. Museums provide access to their collections — works that could not otherwise be studied at this level of detail. In return, Dik’s team provides analysis that informs the decisions museums make about conservation, restoration, display, and provenance. The science feeds directly into practice, and practice generates questions that push the science further.

Transforming Conservation Practice

Before the methods championed by Dik became widely adopted, conservation work was guided largely by visual assessment and accumulated practical experience. That expertise is genuinely valuable and should not be dismissed. But it has limits.

Now, a conservator preparing to clean or stabilise a historic painting can know exactly which chemical compounds are present in each layer before touching the work. They can choose cleaning agents that will not react adversely with specific pigments. They can identify areas where previous restorations have introduced different materials that require different treatment. The risk of accidental damage, which was always a real concern in conservation work, is substantially reduced.

This shift — from intuition-led to evidence-led conservation — is one of the most important practical legacies of the scientific approach that Jeroen Dik represents.

Bringing Art Science to a Public Audience

One of the more underappreciated aspects of Dik’s work is how well it communicates to non-specialist audiences. The idea that a famous painting is hiding something beneath its surface is inherently compelling. It is a story about secrets, about the private lives of artists, about the layers of history compressed into a single object.

Museums have begun incorporating scientific imaging results into their public exhibitions. Visitors can stand in front of a Van Gogh landscape and see, on a screen beside it, the hidden portrait that lies beneath. This kind of display transforms the experience of looking at a painting. It adds depth — literally and figuratively — to something that might otherwise feel remote or inaccessible.

Public interest in heritage science has grown considerably since the high-profile discoveries associated with research like Dik’s became widely covered. That interest matters, because it translates into public support for the funding and institutional infrastructure that cultural heritage preservation requires.

Teaching, Legacy, and What Jeroen Dik Represents in the Field

Shaping the Next Generation at TU Delft

Beyond his research, Jeroen Dik has invested significantly in teaching. At TU Delft, he works with students who are being trained to carry this kind of work forward — people who will bring the same interdisciplinary approach to cultural heritage problems in the decades ahead.

His teaching philosophy reflects his research philosophy. Art history and chemistry are not separate subjects to be studied in isolation. Understanding a painting properly means understanding both what it represents and what it is made of. A student who can move between those two registers — who can read a canvas both as a cultural object and as a physical one — is equipped to ask questions that neither discipline could formulate alone.

The concept he returns to repeatedly is that of the artwork’s full biography. Every painting has a life that extends from the moment the artist first prepared the canvas to the present day. Each stage of that life leaves traces. The job of technical art history is to read those traces and tell the complete story.

A Field Transformed

When Jeroen Dik began his career, the idea of mapping the elemental composition of a masterpiece across its full surface was not yet standard practice. Today, MA-XRF scanning and related techniques are widely used by major research institutions across Europe and beyond. Universities have developed programmes that combine conservation science, chemistry, and art history in ways that would have seemed unusual a generation ago.

That normalisation of interdisciplinary art science did not happen by accident. It was the result of research that demonstrated what was possible, discoveries that captured public attention, and teaching that trained people to continue the work. Dik has been at the centre of all three.

In cultural heritage circles, the name Jeroen Dik has come to represent a specific way of approaching these questions — rigorous, technically precise, and always oriented toward the object itself rather than preconceived interpretations. It is an approach that has earned broad respect across institutions that might otherwise operate quite separately from each other.

Challenges, Honest Limitations, and the Road Ahead

What These Techniques Cannot Do

It would be a disservice to the science to present these methods as infallible. Jeroen Dik has always been clear that they come with real limitations, and understanding those limits is part of using them responsibly.

XRF scanning can produce ambiguous results when multiple pigments overlap in ways that are hard to disentangle. Resolution at depth has its limits — the deeper a layer, the harder it is to capture with complete clarity. In some cases, the signals from upper layers partially mask what lies beneath, even with synchrotron radiation. There are questions that non-invasive analysis cannot answer definitively, and in those cases, targeted micro-sampling may still be necessary — a decision that always involves careful weighing of scientific need against the risk of harm to the work.

The Problem of Access

Synchrotron radiation facilities are large, expensive, and relatively few in number. Gaining access to them for art research requires scheduling, institutional relationships, and funding that not everyone can secure. This means that the most powerful version of this technology is not equally available to all researchers or institutions.

Portable MA-XRF scanners are helping to close this gap. These are devices that can be carried into a gallery and used on-site, eliminating the need to move a fragile and valuable painting to a laboratory. They are less powerful than synchrotron-based systems but capable of producing genuinely useful results. As the technology matures and costs fall, more institutions will be able to use them.

Looking Forward: AI, Portability, and New Materials

The integration of artificial intelligence into the analysis of XRF data is one of the most active areas of development in the field right now. The maps produced by scanning are rich with data, but interpreting them requires significant expertise. Machine learning systems trained on large datasets of known pigments and compositions could accelerate and standardise the interpretation process, making results more reproducible and accessible to non-specialist conservators.

Beyond paintings, the methods pioneered through research like Dik’s are being adapted for other categories of cultural heritage — manuscripts, textiles, ceramics, sculptures, and archaeological artefacts. The same logic applies: physical objects contain physical information, and the right analytical tools can read it without causing damage. The field is expanding, and the foundations laid by work at TU Delft are part of what makes that expansion possible.

Conclusion

The work of Jeroen Dik sits at the intersection of two worlds that are rarely brought this close together. Science at its most precise and art at its most human. The tools he uses — particle accelerators, X-ray fluorescence detectors, infrared cameras, 3D scanners — sound remote from the act of painting. But the questions they answer are deeply personal: How did this artist work? What were they thinking? What did they decide to hide, and why?

That hidden portrait beneath Van Gogh’s Patch of Grass was painted over more than a century ago. Van Gogh himself may have considered it abandoned, irrelevant, superseded by newer work. Jeroen Dik and his team gave it back — not by disturbing a single brushstroke of the painting above it, but by reading the chemistry of what remained. That is not just good science. It is an act of genuine historical recovery, and it speaks to why this kind of research deserves the attention it receives.

The legacy being built through this work extends well beyond individual discoveries. It is embedded in the training of new scientists, in the conservation practices of major museums, and in the growing public understanding that great paintings are not just beautiful objects — they are layered records of human creativity, waiting to be read by those who have the tools and the patience to look.

FAQ 1: Who is Jeroen Dik?

Jeroen Dik is a Dutch materials scientist and Professor of Materials in Art and Archaeology at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. He holds the prestigious Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professorship — a named chair awarded to outstanding researchers who cross disciplinary boundaries. He is globally recognised for developing and applying non-invasive scientific imaging techniques to study, authenticate, and help preserve some of the world’s most iconic historic paintings, including works by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, and Vermeer.

FAQ 2: What is Jeroen Dik most famous for?

Jeroen Dik is most famous for the 2008 discovery of a hidden portrait beneath Vincent van Gogh’s painting Patch of Grass (1887). Using synchrotron radiation-based X-ray fluorescence mapping for the very first time on a painting, he and his international team revealed a detailed portrait of a Dutch woman buried beneath the bright landscape. The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Analytical Chemistry and was covered worldwide by BBC News, National Geographic, and The Guardian. It remains the most publicly celebrated example of what scientific imaging can reveal inside a famous artwork.

FAQ 3: What does Jeroen Dik do at TU Delft?

At TU Delft, Jeroen Dik holds the position of Professor of Materials in Art and Archaeology within the Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering. His department focuses on developing non-invasive and minimally invasive techniques to examine cultural heritage objects without causing any damage to them. He leads research teams that combine chemists, physicists, art historians, and conservators, and he maintains active partnerships with major museums including the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, and the Mauritshuis. He also teaches and mentors graduate students, training the next generation of heritage scientists.

FAQ 4: What is MA-XRF and why does Jeroen Dik use it?

MA-XRF stands for Macro X-Ray Fluorescence scanning. It is the primary imaging tool associated with Jeroen Dik’s research. The technique works by directing an X-ray beam across the surface of a painting. When the X-rays strike the atoms in the pigments, each element — whether mercury, lead, copper, or arsenic — emits its own unique fluorescent signal. A detector captures all of these signals and a computer maps them to their exact positions across the canvas, producing detailed elemental maps of every layer, including those buried beneath years or centuries of overpainting. The crucial advantage is that it is entirely non-destructive: the painting is never touched, never sampled, never altered in any way.

FAQ 5: What hidden painting was found beneath Van Gogh’s Patch of Grass?

Beneath Van Gogh’s Patch of Grass (1887), Jeroen Dik and his team found a portrait of a Dutch peasant woman with a covered head, painted in warm browns and reds — characteristic of Van Gogh’s earlier Dutch period style. The landscape on the surface was painted in bright greens and blues, typical of the work Van Gogh produced after moving to Paris. Art historians believe he painted over the older portrait for financial and practical reasons, as canvases were expensive and reusing them was common practice. Experts estimate that approximately one-third of Van Gogh’s early paintings contain hidden earlier compositions beneath them.

FAQ 6: Is Jeroen Dik’s research non-destructive? Does it damage paintings?

No. Non-destructive analysis is the cornerstone of Jeroen Dik’s research philosophy. Every technique his team uses — MA-XRF scanning, synchrotron radiation XRF, infrared reflectography, X-radiography, and 3D surface scanning — works entirely without physically touching or altering the painted surface. No paint is removed. No samples are taken. No chemicals are applied. The artwork remains completely undisturbed throughout the entire analysis process. This is precisely what makes his methods so valuable to museums, which have a duty to protect the objects in their care and cannot permit testing that carries even a small risk of damage.

FAQ 7: Which famous museums has Jeroen Dik worked with?

Jeroen Dik has worked with several of the world’s most important cultural institutions, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Van Gogh Museum, the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Louvre in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He has also collaborated with research facilities such as the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg and the ESRF synchrotron facility in Grenoble. These partnerships give his team access to major collection objects that could not be studied at this level in any other setting, and in return, the museums receive detailed scientific analysis that informs their conservation and restoration decisions.

FAQ 8: What is synchrotron radiation and how did Jeroen Dik use it on a Van Gogh painting?

A synchrotron is a large particle accelerator that produces very intense beams of X-rays — far more powerful than any laboratory instrument can generate. Jeroen Dik and his team were the first researchers to use synchrotron radiation-based XRF mapping on a painting, doing so in their landmark 2008 study of Van Gogh’s Patch of Grass. They took the painting to the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron facility in Hamburg, where the high-intensity beam was directed across its surface. The synchrotron beam penetrates upper paint layers with minimal distortion and allows large areas to be scanned quickly at high resolution, which is why it revealed the hidden portrait with unprecedented clarity that conventional X-ray radiography had been unable to achieve.

FAQ 9: Did Jeroen Dik work on Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring?

Yes. Jeroen Dik’s team at TU Delft was part of the international research project known as “The Girl in the Spotlight,” which in 2018 subjected Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665) to a comprehensive technical examination at the Mauritshuis in The Hague — conducted in front of the museum’s visiting public. The TU Delft team contributed X-ray analysis and cross-sectional work, and their research revealed that Vermeer used two distinct types of lead white pigment in different areas of the painting and that the seemingly plain dark background was originally a translucent green curtain that had faded and chemically altered over the centuries. The findings were published across several papers in npj Heritage Science.

FAQ 10: How can Jeroen Dik’s techniques help detect art forgeries?

Every pigment has a chemical composition that reflects the materials available when it was made. Certain compounds simply did not exist before specific dates in history. Prussian blue, for example, was not invented until 1704. Zinc white was not commercially available until the 1830s. Titanium white dates to the twentieth century. If a painting claiming to be from the seventeenth century contains any of these substances, the elemental analysis provides definitive, scientific evidence of forgery or misattribution. Jeroen Dik’s XRF mapping can identify the exact chemical fingerprint of every pigment present, giving authentication a firm scientific foundation that cannot be overridden by visual argument or historical documentation alone.

FAQ 11: What is the “biography of art” concept that Jeroen Dik talks about?

The “biography of art” is a framework that Jeroen Dik uses to describe the full goal of his research. Rather than simply asking how to stabilise an artwork or what it looks like right now, his approach aims to reconstruct the complete material history of the object — from the moment the artist first prepared the canvas to the present day. This means understanding where the pigments came from and how they were made, how the artist applied them and what changes they made during the process, and what time, light, oxygen, moisture, and previous restoration work have done to the object since. This framing shifts the purpose of conservation science from maintenance toward historical scholarship, and it is now influencing how heritage science curricula are designed at universities across Europe.

FAQ 12: What is infrared reflectography and how does it differ from MA-XRF?

Infrared reflectography and MA-XRF answer different questions and are often used together. MA-XRF identifies which chemical elements are present in different layers of a painting. Infrared reflectography works by detecting infrared radiation reflected from the canvas. Many drawing materials used by Old Masters — charcoal, certain chalks and inks — absorb infrared strongly, while the paint layers above them are often partially transparent to it. This means infrared imaging can reveal underdrawings: the preliminary sketches and outlines that artists made before applying final paint. These underdrawings show how an artwork was originally planned and where the artist changed their mind during the painting process. Combined with MA-XRF, the two techniques build a much richer picture of how a painting was created.

FAQ 13: Why did Van Gogh paint over his own works?

According to art historians, Vincent van Gogh reused his canvases primarily for practical and financial reasons. During much of his career, he lacked the funds to purchase new materials regularly. Canvases were expensive, and painting over an existing work was a straightforward way to continue working without additional cost. In some cases, he may also have considered earlier compositions unsatisfactory or artistically outdated, particularly when his style was evolving rapidly during the Paris period. As Jeroen Dik’s research has helped demonstrate, experts believe that as many as one-third of Van Gogh’s early paintings contain hidden earlier compositions that he painted over for these reasons.

FAQ 14: What academic qualifications does Jeroen Dik have?

Jeroen Dik studied Art History at the University of Amsterdam, where he also obtained his PhD in Chemistry in 2003 — an unusual combination that gave him the dual expertise in both the cultural and material dimensions of historic artworks that defines his career. Prior to joining TU Delft, he was associated with the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, one of the world’s leading centres for conservation research. He has been at TU Delft since 2003, progressing from associate professor to full professor, and holds the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professorship — a prestigious named chair awarded by TU Delft to recognise exceptional early-career researchers who push across disciplinary boundaries.

FAQ 15: Has Jeroen Dik worked on Rembrandt paintings?

Yes. Jeroen Dik and his team at TU Delft have been involved in projects analysing works by Rembrandt van Rijn, in collaboration with major Dutch institutions including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The analysis reveals compositional changes Rembrandt made during the painting process, underdrawings that show his initial planning, and areas that have been overpainted — either by Rembrandt himself during revision or by later restorers. These findings contribute to the Rembrandt Research Project, the long-running scholarly effort to establish which works are genuinely by Rembrandt and which are by his workshop or later imitators.

FAQ 16: How does 3D surface scanning contribute to Jeroen Dik’s research?

Three-dimensional surface scanning maps the physical topography of a painting’s surface at very high resolution, capturing the actual ridges, grooves, and textures left by the artist’s brushwork. This is different from techniques that look beneath the surface — 3D scanning focuses entirely on what is physically there on top. The data it produces allows researchers to study an artist’s physical technique in detail: the pressure applied, the direction and speed of brushstrokes, and the way paint was layered and built up. For conservators, 3D data also reveals areas of surface deformation, flaking, or damage caused by environmental stress or previous restoration work, helping them prioritise where attention is most needed.

FAQ 17: Is Jeroen Dik involved in any television programmes or public outreach?

Yes. Jeroen Dik has been a regular participant in the Dutch television programme Het Geheim van de Meester (The Secret of the Master), in which a team attempts to recreate famous paintings exactly as the original Old Masters would have made them — using authentic historical materials and techniques. His ability to explain complex scientific processes in simple, accessible language has made him a recognisable public figure in the Netherlands and has helped generate broad public interest in the field of heritage science. His high-profile discoveries, covered by international media, have also contributed significantly to raising public awareness of what art science can achieve.

FAQ 18: Can Jeroen Dik’s methods be applied to objects other than paintings?

Yes, and this is one of the most exciting directions of current research. The non-invasive imaging techniques developed and refined through work like Jeroen Dik’s are increasingly being adapted for other categories of cultural heritage. MA-XRF and related methods have already been applied to drawings, manuscripts, ceramics, and certain sculpture surfaces. Work is ongoing to extend these approaches to textiles, archaeological metal objects, and ancient artefacts made from organic materials. The underlying principle is the same regardless of the object: use the physics and chemistry of the material itself to extract information without causing any harm to the original.

FAQ 19: What are the limitations of the techniques Jeroen Dik uses?

No analytical method is without limits, and Jeroen Dik has been transparent about the constraints of his toolkit. MA-XRF can produce ambiguous results when multiple pigments containing the same elements overlap in ways that are difficult to disentangle. Resolution at depth has real boundaries — the deeper a layer, the harder it is to image with full clarity, as signals from upper layers introduce noise. In some cases, particularly complex works may require targeted micro-sampling as a final step to resolve ambiguities that imaging alone cannot answer — a decision that always involves weighing scientific need against the risk of damage. The most powerful techniques, including synchrotron-based analysis, also require access to facilities that are limited in number and not easily available to all researchers.

FAQ 20: How is artificial intelligence being used in Jeroen Dik’s field?

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are increasingly being integrated into the analysis of data produced by MA-XRF scanning and related techniques. The elemental maps generated by scanning a single painting contain enormous quantities of data, and interpreting them accurately requires considerable specialist expertise. Machine learning systems trained on large datasets of known pigment compositions and painting structures can help automate and standardise part of this interpretation process, making results faster to produce and more reproducible across different researchers and institutions. Jeroen Dik and TU Delft are involved in this developing area, recognising that AI integration will significantly expand the scalability and accessibility of heritage science.

FAQ 21: What is a portable MA-XRF scanner and why does it matter?

Portable MA-XRF scanners are self-contained devices that can be carried into a museum gallery and used to scan a painting on-site, without needing to move the artwork to a laboratory. Traditional MA-XRF analysis often required transporting paintings — a process that carries real risk for fragile, centuries-old objects. Portable scanners eliminate this risk entirely. While they are currently less powerful than the large laboratory and synchrotron-based systems, they are capable of producing genuinely useful elemental maps and are becoming more sophisticated each year. As costs continue to fall, portable MA-XRF is expected to become standard equipment in conservation facilities worldwide, bringing the benefits of Jeroen Dik’s approach to institutions that previously lacked the resources to access it.

FAQ 22: How has Jeroen Dik changed the way museums approach art conservation?

Before the methods championed by Jeroen Dik became widely adopted, conservation decisions were guided primarily by visual assessment and accumulated practical experience. These remain valuable, but they have limits. Now, conservators at major institutions can obtain a detailed chemical profile of every layer of a painting before any treatment begins. They know exactly which pigments are present, where earlier restoration materials have been introduced, and how the original and added materials are likely to respond to different cleaning agents or consolidants. This shift from intuition-led to evidence-based conservation has substantially reduced the risk of accidental damage to irreplaceable works. Many of the world’s most prominent museums now regard this scientific approach as an essential part of their conservation workflow.

FAQ 23: What is the Getty Conservation Institute connection to Jeroen Dik?

Prior to joining TU Delft in 2003, Jeroen Dik was associated with the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles — one of the world’s most respected organisations dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage. The Getty Conservation Institute conducts research, provides training, and develops the tools and knowledge that underpin professional conservation practice globally. Dik’s time there contributed to the international network and scientific perspective he brought back to TU Delft, and reflects the genuinely global nature of the field he works in. The institute’s focus on rigorous, evidence-based conservation methods aligns directly with the research philosophy that has defined his career.

FAQ 24: What is the future of Jeroen Dik’s research and the wider field of heritage science?

The field is moving in several directions simultaneously. Portable MA-XRF scanners are becoming more powerful and more affordable, which will bring high-quality elemental analysis to institutions that currently cannot access it. AI and machine learning are being integrated into data interpretation, making it possible to process and analyse scan results faster and with greater consistency. Standardisation of data formats — so that scan results from different equipment manufacturers can be compared and combined — is progressing, which will eventually make it possible to build a global heritage science knowledge base. Work is also expanding to objects beyond paintings: manuscripts, textiles, ceramics, and archaeological artefacts. The foundational methods developed through research associated with Jeroen Dik and TU Delft are at the heart of all of these developments, and they continue to shape how the field asks its questions and designs its studies.