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Unexpected finding of Egyptian blue emerged in Raphael's fresco Triumph of Galatea at Villa Farnesina, in Rome. This pigment is the oldest man-made blue, dating back to Egyptians who manufactured it first and whose occurrence was thought to be lost with Romans. Thanks to advanced imaging techniques it has been possible to non-invasively map its distribution throughout the frescoed surface and to obtain a non-invasive imaging stratigraphic analysis indicating whether pure painting layers, mixtures or overlapping occurred. Egyptian blue identification on Raphael's Galatea is so far the earliest of sixteenth century, and could be the first step towards its tracking in Renaissance, demonstrating that non-invasive techniques are a mandatory step not only for materials identification but also for understanding art history and its dynamics. Keywords Raphael • Egyptian blue • Macro X-ray fluorescence (MAXRF) • Red-induced luminescence (RIL) • Noninvasive analyses • Villa farnesina * Chiara Anselmi

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Non-invasive optical spectroscopical analyses were conducted on the three main walls of Alexander and Roxane’s Wedding Room in Villa Farnesina, Rome. The north and the east walls were frescoed by Sodoma in 1519. The decoration of the third wall was subsequent and neither the author nor the period is known. The north and east walls underwent various restorations, some even very invasive. For these reasons, the supposed remaining original parts of the two walls by Sodoma were studied and compared with the third one, aiming to obtain more information about its author and epoch. The results show the use of the same pigments for the three walls. In particular, the same yellow pigments including lead antimonate, the use of enamel blue with Bi impurities whose use is time-limited, and the use of a certain kind of purple hematite. The commonality in the pictorial technique also emerged, especially in the yellow parts, painted in the same way on each wall. This information, and documentary sources, reinforce the hypothesis that the third wall was decorated shortly after the death of Agostino Chigi by someone who was well-acquainted with the materials and techniques used by Sodoma for the other two walls.