These were mixed with bases of water, saliva, urine, or animal fats to create paint. The oldest archaeological evidence of paint making was found in the Blombos Cave in South Africa. An ochre-based mixture was dated at , years old, and a stone toolkit used to grind ochre into paint was found to be 70, years old.
Paleolithic cave paintings dated at up to 40, years old in Europe, Australia, and Indonesia depict humans and animals painted with ochres, calcite, charcoal, hematite, and manganese oxide.
Primitive painters applied paint by brushing; smearing; dabbing; and blowing it through hollow bones, like an airbrush. Because pigments come from minerals, trace minerals that remain in the ground pigment can still be viewed with a microscope, providing clues about where it was originally mined and how it made its way along trade routes to the artist—including the 25 mile trek of cave painters from the source of their ochres to the Lascaux Cave 25, years ago in what is now France.
The adoption and evolution of artistic practices in various locations illustrates collaboration among artists across the ancient world, from the Egyptians and Minoans to the Greeks and Romans. Egyptian tombs made of limestone were covered in plaster and painted using six colors: charcoal black, red ochre, yellow orpiment, brown ochre, blue azurite, and green malachite.
King Tut was buried with a paint box that contained powdered malachite, orpiment, and red ochre. Egyptian artists added pigments to binders like egg, resin, or beeswax so the paint would adhere to the plaster. The Minoans developed the technique for frescoes by painting onto wet lime plaster, increasing the durability of the artwork. Greeks developed lead white paint, which was the most popular white paint in use until titanium dioxide replaced it in the nineteenth century.
Lead-based paint has been the source of health issues for painters and others for centuries. Greeks used beeswax-based encaustic painting techniques for pictures and murals that have lasted for centuries.
Romans used Egyptian and Greek pigments and added red vermillion mined in Spain. After being covered by ash flows from erupting Mount Vesuvius in 79 BC, several Roman towns such as Pompeii were forgotten until an accidental discovery in the eighteenth century revealed a snapshot into Roman life and its well-preserved art. The origin of painting as we know it today, historians believe, that it was born in the Neolithic period, X of the millennium BC when the rock painting begins to decline due to the development of agriculture and society, appearing in Ancient Greece and perfected later by the Romans.
Around BC, small villages began to appear in mainland Greece and there began a tradition of painting on ceramic artifacts, such as vases and pots. From the second millennium B. Cities were emerging and Cretan models of mural painting became a standard for this whole area. Palaces and large buildings were built and the walls were painted in a figurative style mixed with geometric designs with people in various activities, such as scenes of worship, games, palace ceremonies, as well as animals and landscapes.
The development of visual perspective and volumetric shading to give three-dimensional depth to the representation of complex scenes.
The paintings became more realistic, in addition to having developed a more natural and idealistic human body model that until today has become a great tradition for the basis of painting that we know today. The preferred colors were white, black, ocher yellow and red; green and violet were the less permanent and less used tones, and blue was very expensive, produced by grinding a semi-precious stone, lapis lazuli.
All of these techniques and motifs became the basis and grounded Roman and then Western painting , and are still widely used in the practice of contemporary painting today. Many painters became famous, such as Agatharchus , Polygnotus , Apelles and Zeuxis , their works were worth fortunes and were avidly collected by the Greeks and Romans.
Despite its importance, it is only known basically for its legacy to the Romans, who later transmitted it to recent times. It is the Romans who owe most of their current knowledge of what Greek painting was, due to the extensive loss of material pieces due to natural disasters that destroyed Greek cities and everything in them, they were the only ones who learned with the Greeks as they were painted.
Although the Greeks remained the fundamental reference throughout the history of Roman painting, the Romans were able to introduce their own readings into the received tradition, creating an individualized language and creating new compositions.
The Romans carried out Greek research on three-dimensionality, and built urban scenes of great architectural and spatial complexity, with an impacting plastic effect and illusion, which were painted in several large spaces such as aristocratic palaces and villages. They gave great value to the landscape and the still life. Inserted in architectural settings, the paintings showed a love of detail and scenes of great expressive strength.
In addition to murals, the Romans were pioneers and used other types of materials to express painting, such as fabric, wood, ivory, metal, stone and canvas.
At the end of their trajectory, perhaps due to the growing Christian influence, they abandoned the Greek reference. Paint manufacturers started replacing lead pigments in some paints, for example, before World War II, when safer alternatives became available. Industry consensus standards limiting the use of lead pigments date back to the s, when manufacturers led a voluntary effort to remove lead from house paints.
Common house paints have contained little, if any, lead since then. In , the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the use of lead in consumer paint. Slide One. Slide Two. Slide Three.
June 29, Dr. Martin Dwyer. Application Developer. Rachel Wright.
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