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Industry : Paints and Pigments
Paints and Pigments
The earliest extant examples of painting date to the Predynastic Period; apart from designs on pottery, these include paintings on textiles and leather as well as the famous but now lost mural in the tomb at Hieraconpolis. The Egyptians continued to decorate their buildings and many of their artifacts with paintings throughout 3,000 years of history; the walls of tombs, temples, palaces, and houses were adorned with carved and painted scenes, and statues, coffins, funerary, and domestic items were often brightly colored while vignettes accompanying the inscriptions in papyri were also carefully painted. Color was regarded as an integral part of an object, and the various hues were considered to have special magical properties. Particular colors were employed for different uses: Gods and goddesses were sometimes painted with green, blue, or golden skin tones, and it was traditional to represent men’s coloring as reddish-brown while women were depicted with lighter, olive complexions. In the temples most of the color on the external walls has now disappeared, while the interior walls have often lost the layer of plaster that once carried the colors so that only the underlying relief carving remains. It is in the nonroyal tombs of the New Kingdom at Thebes, where the scenes were painted directly onto prepared wall surfaces as a substitute for costly carved reliefs, that the most interesting examples of painting and coloring have survived. .
SOURCESThe
vividness of these paintings has often prompted onlookers to inquire
about the nature of the pigments employed by the ancient artists.
Analysis has indicated that these were either finely ground
naturally occurring minerals or were made from mineral substances.
There was a limited range of basic colors, kept in the form of
powdery cakes: black, blue, brown, green, gray, orange, pink, red,
white, and yellow. To produce different shades the artist mixed or
superimposed these basic colors. Black pigment was nearly always a
form of carbon, such as soot, carbon black (lampblack), or charcoal.
For blue the artists sometimes used azurite, a naturally occurring
mineral a blue carbonate of copper found in Sinai and the Eastern
Desert. An artificial frit, however, made by heating together
silica, a copper compound (usually malachite), calcium carbonate,
and natron provided the most commonly used blue pigment. For brown
the artists generally employed ocher or iron oxide, and green
pigment was derived either from powdered malachite (which occurs as
a natural ore of copper, found in Sinai and the Eastern Desert) or
from an artificial frit. To produce gray the Egyptians mixed black
(charcoal) and white (gypsum), and orange resulted from combining
red and yellow ochers or painting red on top of yellow. Again, to
obtain pink, it was customary to mix red ocher with gypsum. For one
of the most important colors red the artists used natural oxides of
iron, namely red iron oxides and red ochers. White pigment was
derived from either calcium carbonate (whiting, chalk) or calcium
sulfate (gypsum). There were two different yellow pigments yellow
ocher and orpiment. Yellow ocher was plentiful in Egypt,
particularly in the north and in the western oases, while orpiment
was probably imported from Asia.
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EQUIPMENT AND MATERIALS
The artist’s equipment was simple and consisted
of water pots, palettes made of shells or broken shards, and
paintbrushes of palm fiber and reeds. The vehicle for applying the
paint to the prepared surface consisted of water and an adhesive
(gelatin or glue). This technique is known as tempera painting. It
was essential that the paint vehicle contained an adhesive to bind
the pigments to the wall surface, and it is probable that size
(gelatin, glue), gum, or albumin (egg white) were used. The
Egyptians painted on canvas, papyrus, plaster, pottery, stone, and
wood. There were several types of plaster: clay, gypsum, and whiting
(chalk). Sometimes the paint was applied directly to the clay
plaster, but gypsum plaster was most commonly used for wall
paintings while whiting was most often employed on wooded objects as
a base for painting. Gypsum plaster was fairly coarse so that it
covered over any irregularities in the wall surface, while whiting
plaster (a mixture of whiting and glue) provided a smoother surface
on smaller objects. Egyptian mural paintings are sometimes called
“frescoes,” but this is inaccurate; there is no evidence that the
paintings were applied while the plaster was still wet, using only
water as the medium. It is uncertain how the tombs were lit to
enable the artists to execute their detailed work. Lamps, developed
as early as the Old Kingdom, consisted of stone or clay cups filled
with oil in which a wick was placed. Although the artists probably
used either these lamps or candles or torches, it is remarkable that
no smoke marks remain visible on the tomb ceilings.
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Industry : Paints and Pigments
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