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wildbrush's art.to.day - you entered my world of technical art info - |
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• Additional colours and gilding • Distribution of the colours and of the gilding |
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Additional colours and gilding: |
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| Where
the Fayum portraits contain colours additional to the basic
four, these are generally limited to the clothing (especially
that of the women) and the jewelry and garlands.
They appear very
occasionally in the flesh areas - for the lips
or the blush on the
cheeks. Such additional colours are natural
rose madder (derived from the root of the madder plant),
various purples, and green. The purples of the garments are painted with
the same pigments that were used to
dye the actual textiles - the expensive porphyry extracted from
seashells, or the less costly madder probably imported from
Greece, which gives a more pinky, cyclamen colour [41].
Terre-verte was occasionally used for green [88]. 34) Gilding was added over the top of certain finished works as jewelry, a wreath, or ornament on a garment. It may be either real gold leaf or gold naturalistically simulated in paint [e.g. 48]. To make gold leaf adhere to the wax surface of an encaustic portrait, egg white may have been used. In painted gold the illusion is perfectly created by a base colour of yellow ochre mixed with a little white and a little red for the local colour; the shading is done using a little black in addition to the other three colours; the highlights are in white plus a little yellow ochre. The French painter J.-A.-D. Ingres said that yellow ochre was handed down from heaven, and that the Greeks invariably used it to imitate gold. Within the tetrachromy it really creates a brilliant illusion of gold. Portraits painted in tempera with stucco additions of jewelry usually have these gilded. Examples are 'Aline' [51] and others from Antinoopolis [90, 93]. |
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Distribution of the colours and of the gilding: |
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| The
following account of how, and in which colours, different parts of the
Fayum portraits were painted refers entirely to portraits in encaustic on
wooden panels. The background - in Byzantine terminology, the kambos - in most cases is in greys, produced by mixing white with a little black, which produces cool greys; the addition of a little yellow ochre gives a slightly greener and more neutral grey. A small amount of red added to either of the above two mixtures gives a warmer grey. The background of most of the portraits, however, looks cool by comparison with the adjacent flesh tones. The entire dynamics of this palette are based on the interaction between the different colours and their individual positions within the composition - as is true of all good painting, of course. Colours look different depending on which colours they adjoin. 35) Thus the notions of 'cool' and 'warm' are relative. On certain portraits, part of the background left exposed by the wrappings is covered in gold leaf, giving a god-like, eternal glow to the picture and symbolizing eternal life [e.g. 87, 114]. The painted portrait with a gilt background was widely in evidence in the Greek world since late Hellenistic times, 36) and went on to form part of the Byzantine icon tradition. The flesh areas in most cases were put down either directly on a toned ground or on an additional layer of khaki local underpainting, the proplasmos; in some portraits, they are laid on the dark honey-brown of the wood. The local colour of the flesh usually consists of a mixture of all four colours of the tetrachromy in varying proportions according to the complexion of the individual portrayed. The men's sunburnt skin, particularly that of the bare-shouldered athletes or ephebes [45, 62, 68-71], recalls the brown tone in which men are characteristically painted in the ancient Egyptian tradition. (This was in its way a reference to reality: Egyptian women, who were not exposed to the sun in the same way, were depicted with yellowish or white skin.) The 'sunburnt' men were sometimes painted with more red and black, using smaller quantities of white and ochre or none at all. Petrie nicknamed one portrait from Hawara 'The Red Youth' [70] because of the impressively potent 'Indian red' of the large expanse of bare flesh. In the majority of the women's portraits the flesh areas are rendered with rather more white and ochre, and less red and black. The red is generally used more locally and mixed into the flesh-tone colour, and is especially apparent on the lips and the cheeks, where it gives the glykasmos blush. The facial features were normally painted with the tetrachromatic palette. Exceptionally a fifth colour, but still a variant of the 'red' family, may be used for lips and cheek-bones. The glykasmos usually echoes the colour of the lips, though in a paler tone, achieved by mixing it with the palest flesh-tones. In one example [48], the lips contain a cyclamen pink colour, probably rose madder, with a paler tone of the same colour on the cheeks. It is recognizably cooler than the earth-red used to give the overall local flesh tone. In some cases the lips of the subjects were gilded [e.g. 55], probably to underline the otherworldly, deified state into which the deceased had passed, according to Egyptian belief. The hair Most of the Fayum subjects have black hair. In a few exceptions it is dark brown [e.g. 51, 108, 119], and in one or two greyish-white. The hair of one older woman [27] poignantly reveals that she had been dyeing it with black henna, since surely what we see at the central parting is the white roots and not a highlight on her dark hair. One of the men, Demetris [56], who looks about fifty, has some white hairs on his otherwise black head. Black hair is usually painted over a flat 'cap' of an almost black dark grey tone, as in the 'Tondo of the Two Brothers' [2]. On this cap, shadows may be marked in pitch-black, and in some portraits highlights are applied in a grey slightly lighter than the middle tone. There are thus three possibilities: one tone only, for the darkest hair [e.g. 65, 71]; two tones, middle and dark [e.g. 6]; and three tones [e.g.48]. Shadows and highlights create the illusion of a third dimension. In portraits with just one tone of black (like that of the younger brother in the Tondo), the curls are painted individually on top of the monotone 'cap' and break up the outline, giving the hair its natural look. Facial hair is usually painted black or brown. More often than not, eyebrows are one-tone black, variations being confined to their texture: thicker wax impasto in these areas, plus the use of hard tools which have left indented 'wound' marks, suggest bushy eyebrows, for example. The wax on eyebrows and men's beards is often laid on as thickly as on the hair of the head [e.g. in 31 and 68]. The garments (see p. 234) The men's clothing is usually white with coloured stripes or clavi. Coloured cloaks denote military status [15-19]. 37) The women's garments are multi-coloured, and it is here that a fifth colour is used in most cases. Not infrequently it is the same as that of the lips and cheeks. Most often it is in shades of purples, rose reds and cyclamen pinks. Occasionally it is green [e.g. 36,111]. Sometimes clothing has gilt ornament. Jewelry is the most colourful part of the portraits, because a sixth and even a seventh colour may have been used to render the gems. Green is used for emerald beads [e.g. 1,41,42,65]. In one portrait [21], the jewelry includes stones in green and minium red (bright vermilion), which is either the red of the overall flesh-tone or an additional red to give a sense of special luxury. In another [29], we find a green, a purple and a pink in addition to the basic four colours. Wreaths Most are of gold leaf. One painted to simulate gold appears in the portrait of Eirene [111]. Green wreaths occur in encaustic and also in tempera [120]. In another charming variant [117] the wreath is made of pink and white crocus-type flowers. < back to page 7 page 9 > |
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