Clay and iron oxide pigments in the history of painting
Section snippets
General outlines and terms
The fine arts and natural sciences are apparently different domains with different tasks, tools and schemes. The art of painting is a kind of the creative activity, where attenuate human ideas and visions are expressed fairly materialistically, through colour. Colour can be taken either as a sensual perception or as a physical phenomenon. But undoubtedly, colour is directly related to the chemical and structural character of the material; therefore the same question, e.g. ‘Why it looks
Earthy pigments
In a widely used art and conservation terminology, earthy pigments are distinguished on the basis of colour as yellow ochres, red earths and boles, green earths, dark yellow or brown siennas and umbers. The use of white earth, represented predominantly by China clay (i.e., high grade kaolin), is limited in the pictorial art in Europe. Sometimes it occurs as an inert pigment or extender (e.g., Huxtable and Pickering, 1979) or, because of its clarity and high absorbency, as a base for certain
White earth
Within the pictorial art, the historical use of white earth is located predominantly in Asia; in Japan, white clay pigments commonly appear up to 15th or 16th century before they are displaced by a calcium carbonate white made from pulverized oyster shells (Winter, 1981). They are documented as kaolinite-rich kaolins used in grounds (=surface coating materials), with some variation of composition, perhaps corresponding to their geographical origin. Typically, kaolin-type clays are used as
Yellow and brown ochres
Earthy pigments varying from dull yellow to red and brown are commonly called ochres in the economic geology, mining industry, and painting. Ochres are defined by Mayer (1991) as clays used to make the earth colours; in pigment terminology, the word ochre is predominantly used as a synonym for yellow ochre. Its colour is given by a presence of different iron oxyhydroxides and oxides, mainly goethite and hematite; sometimes the colour is brownish due to manganese oxides. Different shades occur
Clay minerals
In the practice of restoring art works, laboratory investigations help to identify the materials used in the original painting and describe the layer stratigraphy on cross-sections—that is, the factor critical for understanding the extent and quality of later re-paints and choosing the suitable restoration procedure. Material investigation of these rare 1- to 2-mm and extremely heterogeneous historical fragments needs selective and non-destructive techniques to be described in details. Visible
Conclusions
Clayey materials, particularly extenders, priming coats and many earthy pigments are important components of the ground and colour layers of historical paintings. Their characterisation, however, is underestimated in the examination of the colour layer. The present systematic knowledge on mineral deposits and weathering crusts and the state of art of mineralogy of clays and other microparticulate minerals offer a new challenge to focus on the detailed evaluation of the clayey pigments in
Acknowledgments
The authors are very grateful to qualified restorers from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (Prof. Karel Stretti and his students, namely Jáchym Krejča), National Gallery in Prague (Zora Grohmannová) and others (Romana Balcarová) for their receptivity and provision of rare samples for research purposes. Special thanks should be given to our other colleagues who participated in this research—Snejana Bakardjieva for performing measurements on the electron microscope. This work was prepared on
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