probability the vehicles used for painting by the ancient painters;
certainty, excepting to a very limited extent, is impossible.
Time, which has in some instances spared colours so as to permit a
satisfactory examination into their nature, has uniformly dried up
the substances of the vehicles with which they were laid on; so that
it is only where such things are actually named by ancient authors,
and that is very sparingly, that we can feel any confidence as to the
matter[261].
There is, however, a source of probable conjecture which ought not to
be neglected. The use of oils, resins and gums in medicine has been
recorded; and the mixtures of those incidentally named, are so nearly
what we find used among the earliest painters, of whose works we have
any technical account, that it is scarcely possible to believe that
they were overlooked by the ancients.
For the early pictures on walls, whether the ground were of stone or
stucco, lime-water was doubtless found to be a sufficient binder.
But to adorn the mummy coffins something more than water must have
been required. The Egyptians had the advantage of several native
gum-bearing trees. The Acacia Nilotica, which produces the Gum Arabic;
the Sarcocolla[262], the gum of which Pliny expressly says is used by
painters as well as physicians; and the tree or shrub producing the Gum
Senegal; the Terebinth, yielding the manna thuris, Gum Ammoniac[263]
and Sandarach[264], were likewise all to be found on the borders of
Egypt; and some of these, we know from Herodotus, were employed in
embalming, and therefore very probably as vehicles for the colours with
which they honoured and ornamented the dead.
The desire of showing respect to the remains of those we have once
loved is a blessed principle of our nature. It is at once the cause
and the effect of that tender care of human life which becomes one
of the first principles of civilisation. It is respect and duty,
bestowed where no selfishness can ever expect a return, and by the very
occupation it forces upon us, breaks the first overwhelming violence of
grief, when the day of death, of which no preparation ever took away
the bitterness, arrives, and allows us time and occasion to exert that
moral resolution necessary to a due submission to the will of HIM, who
knoweth best when to give and when to take away.
The solemn death-rites of the Egyptians were practised by priests and
physicians, aided by professional embalmers; and their daily practice
must have led to a knowledge of many physiological facts advantageous
to the science of medicine. The search after substances calculated to
preserve the body could not fail to lead to chemical discoveries of
equal value to the arts. The country itself furnished some of these
substances, but Arabia and the neighbouring nations still more.
Among these, the asphaltum, pissasphaltum, and petroleum, brought from
the Dead Sea, from Babylon, and from the province of Mazenderan, appear
to have been most generally used; and it is a curious fact, that a
substance arising from the partial decomposition of the bodies, mixed
with these mineral substances, should, very early under the name of
mummy, have been employed by Arabian and Jewish physicians in medicine.
It is still stranger that it should have kept its place in the materia
medica of most nations till very lately, and I question whether it be
yet entirely expunged from them.
As a colouring matter, the same mummy was highly esteemed, and is
still often used. But it is giving way to other preparations of
asphaltum with wax, oil, or some equivalent substance. The prejudice
which led to the seeking among the costly embalmed bodies of Egypt a
remedy for disease, is akin to that which is not yet quite exploded
even in England, and which leads the vulgar to pass the hand of a
hanged man over scrophulous swellings as a certain cure. From this
strange superstition even Boyle was not so free, but that, in giving
a recipe for some preparation, he mentions the calcined arm bone of a
_hanged_ man reduced to powder as an ingredient! This same prejudice,
or something like it, led the painters of antiquity to rake, as Pliny
says, among the ashes of a funeral pile for a superior black pigment,
and induced more modern artists to use mummy brown.
The common bitumen or asphaltum, was known by the early physicians to
mix readily with oil, and was much used as an external application;
very ancient artists also varnished their statues of wood or metal with
that mixture, to preserve them from the action of the air[265].
But there was a finer substance, called by Pliny an earth, ampelitis,
which being softened in oil worked like wax. Besides the use of the
ampelitis for plasters, the antique men of the world used it to blacken
their eyebrows and colour their hair[266].
With these uses of asphaltum and ampelitis, softened or dissolved in
oil, the antique painters must have been familiar, and it is difficult
to imagine that they did not avail themselves of so agreeable a colour
and varnish. It answers, in a great degree, to the account given of
the dark fluid with which Apelles varnished his pictures. It would
certainly preserve them from the effects of dust and wet; it would make
the colours richer, and, at the same time, soften the harshness of the
more glaring ones.
Pliny enumerates many resins which were to be dissolved in oil before
they could be used as liniments. They are such as flow from the
terebinth, larch, lentisk or mastic, and cypress; besides the pine
or pitch trees. He also names many gums which might be dissolved in
water, or wine, or vinegar, or a mixture of vinegar and wax. Some
of these gums he occasionally names as useful to painters; and it is
not unreasonable to conclude, that those preparations of them with
oil, which would render them so peculiarly convenient as vehicles for
colour, or varnishes for preserving pictures, were not overlooked.
Such must have been the varnish employed by the Egyptian painters;
the brilliant appearance of which is mentioned in Mr. Clift’s letter,
printed at the end of the first Essay.
There is the authority of Vitruvius for the ancient use of oil in
painting doors and other wood-work exposed to the weather.
With regard to ships, it appears that their colours--and we know from
Homer that they were painted in very ancient times--could not have been
laid on with water. I am ignorant how far petroleum, which was known
to Herodotus, was calculated to resist weather, or whether any of the
resins or juices from the various kinds of fir and pine might, by being
mixed with it, render it fit for the purpose.
Pliny mentions the substance scraped off the bottoms of ships, as a
mixture of pitch and wax, of which a plaster of great efficacy for some
kinds of sores was made. It is clear, therefore, that pitch and wax
were both used to defend the bottoms and seams of the ships from the
effects of the water, and, probably, also to render them smoother, and
so to offer less resistance to the waves.
But the vermilion-prowed ships must have been painted, and very
probably in the encaustic manner; that is, by laying on the colour or
the wax to defend it, hot; this would answer the double purpose of
shielding the colour, and sending the wax or pitch farther into the
substance of the wood, which would thus be better preserved. Indeed,
until the general adoption of oil as a vehicle for colour, nothing
but the encaustic process could have preserved the figure-heads and
the designs on the sterns of the ancient ships during the shortest
voyage[267].
It is a pity that Pliny has not left us a more minute account of the
process of encaustic painting; but it appears to have been so commonly
known and practised in his time, that he has not considered it worth
while to describe it particularly.
He mentions the doubtfulness of its origin and of its inventor, but
speaks of most of the beautiful works of Pausias as having been
executed in that manner. In a subsequent passage, writing of vermilion
and minium, and of the great luxury at which the Romans of his time had
arrived in fine colours, he mentions that walls coloured with those
expensive pigments were apt to blacken unless defended by a varnish of
wax, for which he gives the following recipe:--
“Take white Punic wax, melt it with oil, and while it is hot wash the
painting over with pencils, or fine brushes of bristles, dipped in the
same varnish. When laid on it must be well rubbed, and heated again
with red-hot coals of gall-nuts, held close to it, till the wall may
sweat and fry again, then rub it well with waxed cloths, and then with
clean linen cloths[268].”
This, I believe, is the longest and clearest account we have of this
method of painting or rather varnishing. But there is another passage
in the same author, from which it would appear that colours were made
up with wax for use. For that case the above varnish would be most
appropriate, and without the inconveniences of such varnishes as are
composed of matters which do not correspond with the nature of the
colours and vehicles they cover. The passage is as follows: “If one
be disposed to make black wax, let him put thereto--i. e. to bleached
Punic wax--ashes of paper, like as with an addition of orchanet, it
will be red. Moreover, wax may be brought to all manner of colours for
_painters_, _limners_, and enamellers, and such curious artificers,
to represent the form and similitude of anything they list. And for
a thousand other purposes men have used thereof, but principally to
preserve their walls and armours withal[269].”
We know, then, that the ancients used water, white of egg, solutions
of various gums, vinegar and wax, with or without oil. We may infer
also that they used solutions of resinous substances in oil, asphaltum,
and petroleum, because they were well acquainted with preparations of
these, and their application to a variety of purposes. But it would be
rash as useless to assert that they painted with this or that material,
having no positive information on the subject, and no examples of
antique pictures, which can do more than indicate the nature of their
works in fresco or distemper.
Mr. Raspe, in his ingenious essay on oil painting, as known to the
ancients, has laboured to prove too much, and has therefore not
received all the credit he deserves[270]; but his printing the text
of the monk Theophilus, and of part of Heraclius on the arts of the
Romans, deserves our gratitude[271].
Both these authors direct, that colours for painting doors, and for
preparing panel for pictures, should be ground in linseed oil; and they
observe, that all kinds of colours bear grinding in oil. But all cannot
be ground with gum, and therefore white and red lead and carmine must
be ground with white of egg, where oil is not used. When a transparent
painting was required over a ground of oil, then colour mixed with
linseed oil was absolutely necessary[272].
The next period at which we know from a contemporary writer what
vehicles were used, is the end of the fourteenth century, or the
beginning of the fifteenth, when Cennino wrote; but he professes to
give the exact process of Giotto, a century earlier, being himself very
old when he composed his work, and having been the apprentice of Taddeo
Gaddi, the immediate pupil, assistant, and, in some particulars, the
rival, of Giotto.
The usual vehicle or _tempora_ appears to have been the whole egg beat
up with a gill of pure water to each egg, and mixed with the milky
juice of the fig-tree, where it was procurable.
Several colours, however, could not be used with this ordinary vehicle,
because of the yellow colour of the yolk, which turned the blues green,
and injured some other pigments. In that case, the white of egg
clarified was used, or fine size made of the clippings of parchment, or
even flour paste well, but not too much, boiled. A vehicle of the yolk
of egg alone, for such colours as were not injured by the yellow, was
found to answer equally well in fresco, in distemper, and on panel.
Though Cennino knew, and perhaps occasionally practised painting in
oil, it is evident that the oil was used by him and his masters chiefly
as a varnish. He directs it to be prepared nearly according to the
recipe of the monk Theophilus; the difference being, that the oil is to
be simmered till one half is evaporated, and the pure resin is to be
added, in the proportion of an ounce to every pound of the raw linseed
oil.
Armenino, in A. D. 1600, repeats nearly all Cennino says of vehicles;
he adds several compositions, one of which only I shall notice,
because he tells us that he had heard from the scholars of Corregio,
that it was used by that great man. A varnish composed of the purest
turpentine[273], made hot, to which was added an equal measure of
petroleum, was spread over the picture, previously warmed in the sun
or otherwise. This is said to have been thin, lucid, and durable.
As to modern vehicles, there is no new oil discovered by chemists that
has not been tried, nor any combinations of gums and resins, with oils,
whether fixed or essential. The desire of quickly drying substances
has also produced a variety of vehicles and varnishes, all of which,
in particular cases, and for certain purposes, seem to have answered.
But their use has disappointed the artist in others. Perhaps so great
a variety by tempting to injudicious mixtures, may have caused the
partial failure.
This is a question, however, for practical artists; my business is only
to relate historically what has been done, not to comment on what is
actually doing, or should be done.
And now we must inquire what tools were used by antique artists. Here
again Mr. Wilkinson is our best informant. In the unfinished pictures
in some of the catacombs, he saw traces of the use of charcoal points,
and also of red outlines, corresponding not only with the practice
recommended by Cennino, but with what I saw in the Campo Santo at Pisa,
where, the upper stucco having fallen off, upon which the pictures
themselves had been painted while wet, a line drawn in red earth, like
the bole of Sinope, appeared upon the coarser ground, and had evidently
been corrected preparatory to laying the true ground and colour. The
metal points used for drawing by the early Greeks, were most likely
used also by the Egyptians, where required; but the paintings we are
best acquainted with, namely, those on the mummy cases, are outlined,
if not with a pen or reed, with a fine pencil.
In the curious collection of Egyptian furniture, tools, &c., brought
together by Mr. Sams, there were some palettes; they were oblong, and
had a sort of case at one end for the pencils and brushes, and at the
other a handle. The plates in Rossellini’s Egypt show the manner in
which these were used.
D’Agincourt gives some tracings from an illuminated MS. Dioscorides,
in the library at Vienna, in two of which we find an artist’s study;
in one, a paintress is at work upon a picture sketched upon a moveable
frame, not unlike those used for needle-work; her colours appear to be
in a box, as water colours would be, and she has a small palette held
in the palm of her left hand.
The other is a painter employed in drawing a plant; his easel is
three-legged, his paper is pinned or tacked to a widish board, his
palette is like that of the paintress, and his colour box the same; the
pencils seem as fine as pens in both.
Cennino directs that pencils shall be made either of the tails of grey
squirrels, called Vair[274], answering to sable, or of hogs’ bristles.
He points out with minuteness how to select the longest hairs of the
vair, and how many tails must contribute the longest, in order to make
a good pencil; what is more, he mentions that these soft brushes were
to be used of all sizes, from those which were drawn into the hollow
of a pigeon’s feather, to those requiring a vulture’s quill. As to the
bristle tools, they appear to be exactly what we now use; and the art
of making which appears to be one of those handed down from the Greeks
and Romans, without any change worth notice.
I have thus endeavoured to bring together what is to be known
historically of the mechanical part of painting. Dry and wet plaster,
that is, distemper and fresco, have been employed in all countries,
from Egypt to Mexico, for grounds. Pannel, prepared with a thin coat
of chalk or plaster and size, has been the next general material. The
painted inner mummy cases, where the linen was prepared with plaster,
are the earliest pictures on linen, so far as we can judge. The linen
painted hangings for prize fighters, and Nero’s famous canvas, show
that the practice of painting pictures on linen was not unknown to the
ancients; but when it was first used as a ground, or if its use ever
became general until modern times, we do not know.
The early Italian painters used it at first to strengthen and smooth
their pannel; and, I think, the Venetian painters were they who
rendered its use general.
The most important pigments of the ancients appear to have been
identical with our own.
The vehicles for colour have afforded matter for very needless
controversy. The ancients generally used water, gums, and white of egg;
they frequently, especially in the later schools of painting, used wax,
often mixed with oil of some kind. They were acquainted with the use of
oil as a varnish, and may have used both it and naphtha to paint with
occasionally.
As early as the tenth century, oil was often used for particular
kinds of painting; by the fourteenth, attempts were made (I need not
say, without success) to paint with it on plaster; by the end of the
fifteenth century, it had pretty well superseded other vehicles for all
but fresco and distemper upon walls.
As to the tools, a palette, colour box, soft and hard brushes,
scrapers, &c., of forms and materials differing but little, with a
sponge and pumice stone, were used by all; and very few required more,
when their pigments were once prepared. But the ancient painters,
like the old Italians and Germans, had their colours ground in their
own work-rooms: for this purpose, slabs of porphyry, or some other
hard stone, with mullers to correspond; mortars of marble, or brass,
or iron, with pestles of wood or metal, were requisite; and, in some
cases, the very furnaces for calcining their ochres, or dissolving
their gums, were of their own construction.
Hence the frequent mention of apprentice boys, who never reached
higher in the art than colour-grinders. Others became mere mechanical
copyists, multiplying in ancient times the actual patterns of
certain gods and heroes, and in later times, favourite saints, or
even whole compositions. But the better sort either equalled or
excelled their masters. Apelles surpassed Pamphilus, Giotto excelled
Cimabue, Raffaelle and Michael Angelo left their masters Perugino and
Ghirlandaio far behind.
FOOTNOTES:
[214] I have mentioned the antique picture before, that proves that the
ancient Italians _horsed_ the boys and used the rod, just as was done
ten years ago in England (and may be still in remote counties), as the
best way of improving the memory. I have the authority of Pausanias,
that boys used strings to set off their tops, and that young ladies
played at what Scotch children call chuckie stanes, in Old Greece.
[215] Pantænus, the brother of Phidias, used a plaster or stucco in the
Temple of Minerva at Elis, mixed with milk. This should be something
like the beautiful marble-like stucco or _chunam_-work of India. I once
saw a floor laid at Madras, among the materials of which were jaggree,
or coarse sugar water and milk. Ram Raz, in his treatise on Hindu
Architecture, says:
“_Chunam_, intended for fine plastering and ornamental works, is
ground by women on an oblong granite stone, and a cylindrical upper
stone about four inches in diameter; the mixture is sometimes ground
two, three, and four times, to bring it to the required fineness and
purity. In all the operations of _chunam_-work, _jaggery_ water, i.
e. a solution of molasses or coarse sugar, is invariably added by the
builders, and its use appears to have prevailed from the remotest ages.
There are various opinions among the modern practitioners regarding
its usefulness, but those who have had the most extensive practice in
building hold it as an indispensable ingredient in the formation of a
durable and hard cement; and it is stated that the operator evidently
perceives the dissolvent property of the _jaggery_ water, on its being
tempered with the prepared mortar.”
[216] I must make an undignified, though I believe an intelligible,
comparison--the plaster is very like that applied to wooden dolls of
the old school, and which children used to call _alabaster_. I believe
it was made of finely pounded marble, and was largely used in the
manufacture of Saints for Roman Catholic churches.
[217] Our sycamore is a maple, and its fruit is not eatable.
[218] Book xiii. ch. 7.
[219] Book xvi. ch. 39.
[220] Theophrastus died B.C. 208 years, at the age of 107.
[221] Cennino Cennini trattato della Pittura, ch. 6.
[222] In the 13th book and 12th chapter of Pliny’s Natural History,
he tells us the size or paste used by bookbinders was made with fine
wheaten flour, boiling water, and a little vinegar, which is our common
shoemaker’s paste. And in book xi., chapter 39, we learn that the
stronger glue was made, as now, of the hides of cattle boiled down.
He says _bull’s_ hide makes the strongest glue. The ancients seem
to take some strange things for granted. A bull is stronger than a
cow--therefore--his hide makes stronger glue. An English mechanic would
have tried the experiment.
[223] This tallies with Erasmus’ description of English houses at
nearly the same period, in one of his letters.
[224] This white is phosphate of lime.
[225] The tool, and the outline produced by it, were no doubt
legitimately descended from the antique CESTRUM and SKIAGRUM of Fuseli.
There is an unfinished picture by Giovanni Bellini, in the Florence
Gallery, in which the white ground on the board is visible. The marks
of the tool are also distinct, a little indented, and the shadowed
part is hatched. Over this there is a brown transparent colour, which
has thickened in the indented lines and hatchings, rendering the
lines darker; had he hatched again through the transparent ground to
the white ground in the lights, we should have had, as I conceive, a
perfect monochrome.
[226] In his Histoire de la Peinture Ancienne, wherein he has printed
what he calls the thirty-fifth book of Pliny, with his translation; but
he has left out what pleased him, and inserted other parts of the work,
and omitted the numbering of the chapters, so as to render it difficult
to detect his want of fidelity.
[227] Book XXXV. ch. 7. A passage in one of Horace’s Satires describes
pictures, whether on cloth or wood, suspended at the entrances to the
public shows at Rome, nearly as we should now describe the pictures
exhibited for the same purposes by Gingel and his ingenious brethren,
to invite spectators to their itinerant playhouses, and such as the
lamented Pidcock used to allure them to the shows of elephants and
tigers.
If some fam’d piece the painter’s art displays,
Transfix’d you stand, with admiration gaze[228];
[228] In the original the painter’s name is mentioned; it is Pausias of
Sicyon.
[229] Pliny, Natural History, Book xiii. ch. 11.
[230] Libri sacri scritti in tela di lino, sorta di volumi antichissimi
molte di quali vide Frontone custoditi in Anagni.--MICALI. _Storia
degli Antichi Popoli Italiani, page 32._
In Wilks’ History of the South of India, there is an account of the
cudduttum, curruthum, or currut, used as books in that province. It
is a strip of cotton cloth, covered on both sides with a mixture of
paste and charcoal. The writing is done with a pencil of lapis ollaris,
called balopium, and may be rubbed out like that on a slate; the cloth
is folded in leaves like a pocket-map, and tied up between thin boards
painted and ornamented. This mode of writing was anciently used for
records and other public papers, and in some parts of the country
is still employed by merchants and shopkeepers. It is very durable,
indeed probably more so than either paper, parchment, or the palm leaf.
Colonel Wilks supposes it to be the linen or cotton cloth on which
Arrian states that the Indians wrote.