Insights into mixed carbon–iron gall ink and its degradation
While TabulaRasa primarily investigates practices of erasing and rewriting on clay and wax tablets, Alessandro Vergara’s team within the project’s unit at the University of Naples ‘Federico II’ (UNINA) complements this research by studying ink writing, including both writing techniques and erasure practices.
The UNINA team presented its first results on mixed carbon–iron-gall inks and their degradation mechanism in an oral contribution at the XXII National Conference on the Chemistry of the Environment and Cultural Heritage, held in Palermo on June 16th–19th, 2026. The chemical study starts from a specific case study (in collaboration with the Royal Palace of Caserta), but it has a wide impact on the study of mixed inks. Indeed, this UNINA research activity shows the significant degradation occurring to the iron-gall complex, which is hardly detectable (without HPLC-MS/MS) in the presence of carbon black, thus highlighting some general analytical challenges in the study of such mixed inks. Therefore, we propose and apply a protocol in which a Raman-based pre-screening easily detects carbon black in ink, and, in the presence of carbon black, the protocol recommends combining a sufficiently sensitive HPLC-MS/MS in order to indirectly identify the oxidation products of gallic acid, thus providing a definitive assignment of the ink recipe that would otherwise remain inconclusive. A manuscript has also been submitted.
Look here for the Book of abstracts (see on p. 65)
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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Alessandro Vergara, Silvia Pizzimenti (June 30, 2026). Insights into mixed carbon–iron gall ink and its degradation. TabulaRasa. Retrieved August 16, 2026 from https://tabularasa.hypotheses.org/5790
