The investigation of artworks of cultural heritage is generally aimed at the characterization of the constituent materials and the evaluation of their state of conservation. Research may shed light on the pigments and their potential deterioration mechanisms, and on the conservation treatments. Laboratory analysis on micro-samples taken from the artwork is still an invaluable practice for a deep understanding of the paint layer composition. In this context, a powerful technique is spectral microscopy, which acquires the spectrum for each point in the image of a sample. To acquire a continuous spectrum, one very efficient method is based on Fourier-transform (FT) spectroscopy as it allows massive parallelization on all the image pixels. Here we introduce a hyperspectral microscope based on an innovative FT spectrometer; the device is compact, robust, with high throughput and broad spectral coverage. In our microscope, light is collected by an infinity-corrected objective, propagates in the innovative spectrometer and is imaged on a silicon monochrome CMOS camera by a tube lens. The typical spectral resolution of the microscope, which can be flexibly adjusted for each measurement, is 3 THz (4 nm at 600 nm). We show very compact implementations of the hyperspectral microscope and their use for wide-field imaging of reflection, fluorescence and, interestingly, fluorescence-free Raman spectra. Thanks to the high throughput, the acquisition time of our microscope is significantly shorter than traditional raster-scanning approaches.
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