Study of industrial Cd_xSe_yS_(1-x-y) pigments structure employed by Italian divisionists.

Industrial pigments have renewed the way to make art, allowing painters to have new, more stable, reliable, and purer materials. One important family of these pigments is the cadmium sulfur selenide, which is a solid solution whose color ranges from light yellow to dark red, depending on the Cd/Se ratio. These materials were industrialized at the end of the XIX cent, and one of the first painters to employ them was Pellizza da Volpedo. A series of analyses have shown the use of these pigments in some of his tests and his famous painting "Il quarto stato". For this reason, a study on the pigments employed by the artist is now going on. The project aims to fully characterize these pigments produced by the 'Zecchi' company, which still employs the original production technique.