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wildbrush's art.to.day - you entered my world of art history -

Comparative Advancing Art History     
 of Pigments and Mediums     
in European and Asian Cultures     

PIGMENTS, PAINTING, SCULPTURE IN B.C. HISTORY:
- MEDITERRANEAN CIVILIZATIONS

THRACE

A.D. 500 CONSTANTINOPLE. Hagia Sophia, four pendentive pillars hold up the dome. A great architectural achievement by Justinian, successor to Rome in the sixth century. This is the First Golden Age of Byzantine, it will end with the Iconoclastic controversy of the ninth century.

A.D. 600 ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS. The transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, still in the second dark age period, art is nowhere yet. The monasteries are the only places any painting is being done, they are the decorated manuscripts that persist for another five hundred years. Painting in books is a little like the Chinese are doing, by painting on scrolls and putting them in boxes.

A.D. 700 CONSTANTINOPLE. The Lucca Manuscript describes some little known forms of art, one called "Pictura Translucida". At this time when artists were making paintings more beautiful than ever seen today. They had not only a complete opaque palette, but a compleat transparent palette as well. By todays standards the colors were not as permanent as todays pigments though. They made a halo or face glow by adding reflectance to the surface support.

They, the Byzantines, painted on a shinny tin plate. To give you an idea of how this works, raw sandracca resin can have a yellow transparent color, and when painted on shinny tin give the appearance of gold. Sandracca can be made clear and has a very hard finish. Sandracca uses alcohol, lavender oil and castor oil as it's thinner and plasticsizer to change the painting viscosity.

However this Sandracca resin pitch medium would not mix with resin pitch turpentine mediums, just as another popular medium of the time would not mix with turpentine, Cera Colla. Cera Cola was a wax and ammonia medium that was better suited to painting murals as it was softer and could scratch off a hard surface. This medium is erroneously called encaustic painting, when the ammonia evaporates it leaves behind only the wax, as in encaustic, which is a hot process. The Visuvious paintings were Cera Cola not encaustic.

The turpentine based mediums that were used in Pictura Translucida on tin were before oil was added to paint. This was before Cennini, in the Dark Ages of Greece. Some of these mediums that dissolve in turpentine would also dissolve in alcohol. Wax, would not dissolve in alcohol but would dissolve in turpentine, and so was used with these pitch resin oil varnishes; Levantine Mastic, Chian Mastic, Copal and Amber. Wax imparts the flowing quality to turpentine based paints just as Castor Oil does to Sandracca. These were the mediums used to paint Pictura Translucida pictures on tin mirrors.

Here is an example of a Pictura Translucida painting.

I really enjoy the added thrill in planning the choice of painting opaque or transparent passages of color. Whether or not I would work a passage to reflect back light if the light source had it right angle.

Here is a tip if you are going to try painting in this style on a shinny support such as Silver, zinc, tin, aluminum, chrome or silver colored plastic. A mirror will not work as the clear glass has thickness. Treat the unpainted areas as a dark color. Use Opaque white as highlights.

They did have some advantages back than, their lead whites were hand ground thicker and courser so they painted more opaque and dried faster. Also they had their favorite color, Naples Yellow in tints from a cooler green-side pale yellow-brown, to a warmer red-side. Higher calcined antimony lead colors were lightest.

Here are the names and brands of transparent colors I have used with great satisfaction.

Rembrandt Asphaltum, Mussini Burnt Umber, Mussini Burnt Sienna, Blockx Transparent Yellow, Old Holland Indian Yellow-Brown Lake Extra, Old Holland Indian Yellow-Orange Lake Extra, Old Holland Indian Gambage Lake Extra, Rembrandt Rose, Danial Smith Quinacridone Violet, Rembrandt Ultramarine Violet, Liquitex Dioxine Violet, Blockx Ultramarine Blue, Grumbacher Thalo Blue, Rembrandt Blue Green. With these transparent colors it is possible to make the deepest opaque darks.

Another "lost technique" was called "cera colla", which is ammonia and wax emulsified wax paint. Bees wax from the "honey mountain" in Greece, emulsified with ammonia from the city of Ammonium, in Egypt. The Egyptian's painted their walls with it, buff it up and it would radiate reflecting light, passageways would glow with this ammonia and water based wax paint. Casine can be added to this water based medium. Other mediums he talked about were; stic-lac and borax mixed, this made an India water-based paint. Gilding gums, alum, as used in dyeing, egg and wax emulsions, and the exceptional Chios resin paintings. None of these paintings survived either.

Heracluis also wrote about art at this time, he wrote about oil paints, and egg white plus alum, for miniature painting.

A.D. 867 CONSTANTINOPLE. Under Basil I in 867, their Second Golden Age starts and the "Dark Ages" are over. So is the Second Golden Age after the capture of Constantinople by the Forth Crusade in 1204. This new Latin kingdom only lasted fifty years or so and left way for the Byzantine Renaissance which produced more mosaics with an even stiffer style and more churches. Their art and architecture did influence Russia and Rome though, because they were just spinning their wheels.

Other parts of the world were doing better, India was traveling at warp speed, also I have a little to say about the Tang period in China.

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