Engraved & Printed by Illman Brothers.
THE PHILÆ ISLANDS[ToList]
FOR THE MUSEUM OF ANTIQUITY
We shall now make a few extracts from Mr. Wornum's excellent article on the vehicles, materials, colors, and methods of painting used by the Greeks.
The Greeks painted with wax, resins, and in water-colors, to which they gave a proper consistency, according to the material upon which they painted, with gum, glue, and the white of egg; gum and glue were the most common.
They painted upon wood, clay, plaster, stone, parchment, and canvas. They generally painted upon panels or tables, and very rarely upon walls; and an easel, similar to what is now used, was common among the ancients. These panels, when finished, were fixed into frames of various descriptions and materials, and encased in walls. The ancients used also a palette very similar to that used by the moderns, as is sufficiently attested by a fresco painting from Pompeii, which represents a female painting a copy of Hermes, for a votive tablet, with a palette in her left hand.
The earlier Grecian masters used only four colors: the earth of Melos for white; Attic ochre for yellow; Sinopis, an earth from Pontus, for red; and lamp-black; and it was with these simple elements that Zeuxis, Polygnotus, and others of that age, executed their celebrated works. By degrees new coloring substances were found, such as were used by Apelles and Protogenes.
So great, indeed, is the number of pigments mentioned by ancient authors, and such the beauty of them, that it is very doubtful whether, with all the help of modern science, modern artists possess any advantage in this respect over their predecessors.
We now give the following list of colors, known to be generally used by ancient painters:
Red.—The ancient reds were very numerous, cinnabar, vermilion, bisulphuret of mercury, called also by Pliny and Vitruvius, minium. The cinnabaris indica, mentioned by Pliny and Dioscorides, was what is vulgarly called dragon's blood, the resin obtained from various species of the calamus palm. Miltos seems to have had various significations; it was used for cinnabaris, minium, red lead, and rubrica, red ochre. There were various kinds of rubricæ; all were, however, red oxides, of which the best were the Lemnian, from the Isle of Lemnos, and the Cappadocian, called by the Romans rubrica sinopica, from Sinope in Paphlagonia. Minium, red oxide of lead, red lead, was called by the Romans cerussa usta, and, according to Vitruvius, sandaracha.