Spectroscopic Benchmarks by Machine Learning as Discriminant Analysis for Unconventional Italian Pictorialism Photography.

Up to the 1930s, the Italian pictorialism movement dominated photography, and many handcrafted procedures started appearing. Each operator had his own working method and his own secrets to create special effects that moved away from the standard processes. Here, a methodology that combines X-ray fluorescence and infrared analysis spectroscopy with unsupervised learning techniques was developed on an unconventional Italian photographic print collection (the Piero Vanni Collection, 1889-1939) to unveil the artistic technique by the extraction of spectroscopic benchmarks.