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wildbrush's art.to.day - you entered my world of technical art info - |
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The painting media - Encaustic: |
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The painting media: - Encaustic |
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| The
encaustic technique developed in Classical times, during the finest period
of Greek painting, as a medium appropriate for realistic representation.
We do not know exactly in what sense the word 'encaustic' was used in
antiquity, but its etymology - from the Greek enkaio, to burn-in -
certainly implies the use of heat. The Roman writer Seneca (d. AD 65),
in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter, leaves
no doubt that the process of choosing and applying paints
was carried out at great speed, and that would only be
necessary with a molten wax medium. Today the term has come to mean any form of painting that involves the use of beeswax, either hot or cold, and would therefore include painting with Punic wax, which is used cold. The precise composition of the medium has proved to be a continual source of disagreement. The main theories are that the wax was either applied hot, in the form of pure beeswax, or beeswax with resins added, that had been melted and mixed with pigments prior to application; or that it was applied cold after emulsifying it (by a process known as saponification), which allowed it to be mixed with pigments, egg and oil, and used either while still warm or after cooling. Until the day when more portraits have undergone laboratory analysis, it is impossible to know for certain which were done using hot wax and which were done cold. Just by looking at them closely, however, is it possible in some cases to see which of the two wax techniques was employed. The bare-shouldered man from Hawara [45], for example, could not have been painted with anything other than partly emulsified wax (Punic wax) mixed with egg and perhaps a minute quantity of oil. 6) The entire surface shows the use of brushes of various widths, and the appearance of the brushstrokes indicates that a thick emulsion with considerable impasto was used. This is most apparent in the area of the black hair and in the thick strokes used on the background; there are also some dots of impasto on the nose. Another example is the younger Artemidorus [58]. These portraits painted with Punic wax look more calligraphic than those painted with hot wax, but they have none of the linear cross-hatching characteristic of tempera. |
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| What
of the tools used to paint with hot wax? Scrutiny of the portraits shows
us brushstrokes, and, almost invariably, the use of some sort of hard
tool, leaving distinctive marks in the paint surface. A phrase in Pliny
refers to 'those who painted in encaustic with the cauterium, the cestrum
and the brush', clearly specifying the existence of three different instruments.
11) The first two were hard tools. The cauterium is not described by Pliny, which suggests that it was too well known to require explanation. It was probably employed hot, blending tones together where the paint had already been applied with brushes, particularly in the flesh areas. Its use would give a non-uniform surface, characterized by triangular-shaped 'wound' marks or zig-zag lines, which softened edges between contrasting colours, and roughened the otherwise too smooth and shiny surface of the solidified wax [e.g. 65]. 12) In Pliny the cestrum - which he calls 'a small pointed graver' - is associated specifically with encaustic painting on ivory. 13) My own examination of the portraits has shown me 'carved' lines on the surface of the paint in many of them such as would be consistent with a tool like the cestrum, or perhaps the pointed handle of a brush [38]. (The practice of drawing with a sharp needle-like tool into the impasto is by no means unusual: it can be seen, for example, in the workof Rembrandt - for rendering the texture of hair - and also in Paul Klee and Max Ernst.) Since the portraits continued to be painted for two centuries after Pliny's death, it is possible that during this time the cestrum came to be used for painting portraits also. The third tool is the penicillum or brush, the employment of which is evident from the appearance of the portraits. The background and most surfaces of colour were applied with brushes and only afterwards pushed around and 'marked' and 'carved'. Some portraits are painted with the use of brushes only [88]. 14) The identity of the hard tools is still being debated, and there is also disagreement over how each of them was used. Petrie contended that all the marks to be found on the mummy portraits can be produced by a brush alone, 15) utilizing a stiffened brush or the brush handle rather than any other tool to roughen the surface of the flesh areas, blending tones. Other scholars assert that a brush was used for the background, garments and hair, but a different tool, some suggest the cestrum, to paint the face and neck to produce the non-uniform surface relief. 16) The nature of the tool, however, refutes this: since the cestrum was a small, needle-like implement, it would have been able to transfer only minute quantities of wax to the panel at a time. The first stage in the painting of the portrait probably consisted of blending the powdered pigments with wax. Next a preparatory ground would normally be applied to the surface to be painted (as described above, p. 93). After an outline had been sketched roughly with thin black distemper paint [110, 39], the background, garments, and hair would be laid on with long even strokes of a wide brush, using hot beeswax and applying it quickly. The features of the face and neck were initially also painted with brushes, using thick, creamy, paste-like paint. When the waxes cooled, a hard tool was used to blend in the different flesh tones. This left distinctive zig-zag or triangular 'wound' marks in the thick wax. In my experiment at working with hot wax, I heated beeswax to melting point, added pigments (using only such as were known to have been used at that period, carbon for example) and Chios mastic, also melted by heating, and found that painting was fairly easy as long as the paint was applied rapidly and accurately. The result was a texture quite similar to that of many of the portraits. 17) < back to page 2 page 4 > |
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