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An unexpected secret was found hidden beneath the surface of museum masterpieces.  A technique based on the same kind of technology used in airport scanners has revealed images beneath a fresco that was kept at the Louvre museum in Paris.

In a first, art historians have used terahertz radiation to reveal an early fresco beneath the surface of "Trois hommes armés de lances" ("Three men armed with lances"), one of the Louvre Museum's ancient Roman fresco treasures. The research was presented Wednesday (April 10) at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans. The new research suggests that under that forgery lies a real Roman fresco.

The discovery was announced at the American Chemical Society meeting by Bianca Jackson of the University of Rochester in the US. "We were amazed, and we were delighted. We could not believe our eyes as the image materialized on t he screen," Jackson said in a statement.

Terahertz waves have the ability to penetrate materials without causing any harm. Over the last few years, these waves have been added to a set of tools used to examine cultural heritage. These tools span much of the electromagnetic spectrum from X-rays to ultraviolet to the infrared - and of course microscopy with visible light.

 'X-ray is a transmission technique, so when you've got three to four inches of plaster and a paint layer that's a few tens of microns, the signal of the paint is lost,' explains Jackson. 'Infrared reflectometry is usually pretty good with thin layers but in this case the preparation layer was too thick.'

Jackson also has used terahertz technology to examine a fresco from the Riga Dom Cathedral in Latvia and a Neolithic site in Çatalhöyük, Turkey, renowned for its spectacular wall paintings.