When you walk into a museum you ’re in all likelihood not thinking about chemistry . Yet you in all probability ought to be . Before the industrial rotation convey us fabricate paint , painters had to be great druggist — tinker with rare , expensive , and sometimes downright poisonous chemical to make color .
At London ’s National Gallery this summer , a show calledMaking Colourlooks at this lost geological era of art and skill , convey visitors through a taking over of galleries devoted to specific colors and how they were made . The show is as much about unwrap these ingredients as it is the house painting — for model , in one video recording , a conservator show us how a tiny patch of regal pigment is cast in a rosin block and then ground down to learn under the microscope . What ’s bring out ? A microscopical mixture of red and racy , of course :
We ’ve front at this theme before — last class , Hyperallergic did an amazing postabout obsolete pigments that include colors like Indian Yellow , a blusher made from the pee of cow pressure to only eat Mangifera indica . ButMaking Colourgives us a bit more context . Below , retrieve several interesting ingredient mentioned in the showing — along with a few extras of our own .
Orange paint was tricky — accord to the National Museum , it was notoriously difficult to come by . One method acting included using realgar , a mineral that ’s also bed as “ ruby of arsenic . ” Extremely poisonous stuff , it was used as rat poison and weed cause of death throughout mediaeval Europe — it also function as the base for this 1685 picture by Rachel Ruysch .
Image : The National Gallery , London .
The gullible background of Hans Memling ’s 1475 painting , The Virgin and Child with Saint John , was made by mixing oil with verdigris — another name for the poisonous pigment that ’s made from the patina on age copper , the same stuff the Statue of Liberty is coated in .
In the museum ’s “ red room , ” curator depict the various path in which painter accomplish deep ruby red — like cardinal , which is made by boiling down crush bodies of insects that course bring forth carminic Elvis . The ruby scrubs in Albrecht Durer’sThe Virgin and Child , for example , was produced with variations on carmine red , according toPigments Through the Ages . Carmine is still used usually in consumer products — and food for thought .
From lazuline to lapis lazuli , the creation of pure blueing was an expensive affair . This 1691 Pierre Mignard painting , The Marquise de Seignelay and Two of her Sons , has crushed up lapis lazuli to thank for its deep cobalt gloss .
Though black does n’t have to a great extent in the exhibit , it ’s worth mentioning that for one C of years , catamount used charred fauna osseous tissue to create a dark matte black called Bone Black ( in fact a ship’s company called Ebonexstill makes it ) . Likewise , Mummy Brown was made from the ground - up hide of excavated Egyptian mummies ( and sometimes mummified cats ! ) . It became popular in the nineteenth 100 , when it was used to make cryptical , warm Robert Brown like those in this 1814 painting by Martin Drolling .
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