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wildbrush's art.to.day - you entered my world of technical art info - |
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Colours and gilding • The four-colour palette |
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Colours and gilding: |
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In most of the Fayum images a restricted palette of four basic colours was used in the actual portrait areas (flesh, facial features and hair): white, yellow ochre, red earth and black. Additional colours, such as blue, green and purple, may be used for clothing, jewelry and garlands, and, as a final touch, gold leaf may be added, but the essential elements rely on the four colours. 23) These yield a wide range of subtle colours and had, by the time of the mummy portraits, been used for centuries as primaries in Greek painting. (The modern primaries are red, yellow and blue.) Pliny marvelled at the restraint of the great artists of the 4th century BC, noting that 'four colours only were used by the illustrious painters Apelles, Aetion, Melanthius and Nicomachus to execute their immortal works'. (In fact they also at times used additional colours.) He lists a whole range of exotic pigments available to the painters of his own day and complains that 'it is values of material and not of genius that people are now on the look-out for'. 24) He mentions nine basic colours which could be mixed with wax: purple, indigo, blue, Melian, orpiment, Appian, ceruse, red and black. 25) Seneca, as we have seen, refers to encaustic painting with colours 'in great quantity and variety of hues'. Yet the Fayum portraits, of which the first appeared in Pliny's lifetime, are very simple in their colour harmonies and composition. Using Greek skills passed on through generations, it would be plausible that in their colouring as in their naturalism they are in the tradition of the Alexandrian school. |
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The four-colour palette: |
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| Understanding
the four-colour palette (tetrachromy) of the Greeks
is perhaps rather less difficult than has been made out
in recent publications on ancient painting.
26)
Here as in other
areas light has been shed by Yannis Tsarouchis, who all
his life through reading and experiment sought to comprehend
ancient Greek and Byzantine painting: he demonstrated that the tetrachromy
was capable of creating a great
range of mixtures and colour harmonies. 27)
In the Fayum
corpus there is no monotony, as each portrait has a specific colour scheme
of its own. Two other antique works, both
from Pompeii (and both now in the Naples Museum), show
what extremely accomplished results can be obtained with
the use of only four colours: one is the wall-painting known
as Hercules and the Infant Telephos, and the other is the
celebrated Alexander Mosaic from Pompeii, derived from
a late 4th- or early 3rd-century BC painting. (Mosaics are
particularly revealing of colouristic principles.) In
modern times it has been asserted that the Greek palette of
primaries must also have included blue. 28)
While the pigment
Egyptian blue has been identified chemically in the face
of one portrait [88] 29)
it is certainly exceptional for flesh areas.
There are often blue-greys, but they have most probably been achieved
through lightened blacks [e.g.
14], and
usually they appear in the backgrounds [e.g. 13, 103] or additional
props. When Tsarouchis experimented with Pliny's four specific colours he was rewarded with some amazing results. He proved, among other things, that an infinite variety of bluish greys can be obtained with black soot (Pliny's atramentum), varying slightly depending on which material was burnt in each instance. Whereas burning ivory produces a brownish soot, burning dry dregs of wine produces a far more bluish soot. The Roman architectural writer Vitruvius, who devoted an entire chapter to the colour black, noted that 'the use of finer wines will allow us to imitate not only black but indigo'. 30) (This, in modern terminology, is vine black.) In the Protaton monastery at Karyes on Mount Athos, Tsarouchis examined parts of a wall-painting of c. 1300 attributed to Manuel Panselenos which colour photographs had shown as blue, and concluded that the 'dark blue' background was done with a warm black (containing just a little yellow), whereas the 'blue' of the garment of Christ was in fact a cooler black (possibly vine black), both with the addition of white. 31) Pliny tells us that Apelles and his fellows used 'of whites Melinum; of yellow ochres, Attic; of reds, Pontic Sinopis; of blacks, atramentum' (soot, or carbon). 32) In the majority of the Fayum portraits, where there are small deviations from the original white, yellow ochre, red earth and black mentioned by Pliny this is only to other variants of the same colours, probably determined by what was available in Egypt: e.g., instead of white lead white chalk may be used; instead of red earth, minium (red lead) or haematite. 33) In most portraits the red is a variation of the colour known by English painters as 'light red' and in French as rouge anglais. This is an earth colour; one way of obtaining it is to heat and burn yellow ochre, producing red ochre. In certain portraits of men, especially those with bare shoulders, a still darker, earth-red was used instead, almost a burnt sienna; or a more bluish red resembling Indian red. Two of the portraits from Hawara look as though they were painted with one or other of these two darker reds [69, 70]. < back to page 6 page 8 > |
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