What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna

18 WHAT PAINTING IS
Vermilion is an artist’s pigment, composed of the two most
important alchemical materials, and synthesized according to a
method that was used by Greek alchemists. (Vermilion,
incidentally, was the crucial evidence in the debunking of the
Turin shroud: samples of the “blood” were sent to Chicago and
analyzed in the McCrone Research Laboratories, by specialists in
artists’ pigments; they found that the red was composed of
mercury and sulfur instead of hemoglobin: it was cinnabar, not
blood.)
Alchemists and artists also share a predilection for bizarre
ingredients. Early in this century a gelatinous extract from the
swim bladders of sturgeons was used as an ingredient in oil
paint; and before the introduction of collapsible paint tubes in the
mid-nineteenth century, artists bought their colors in packets
made from pigs’ bladders. In the Renaissance, fish glues were
sold in rancid wafers; the artists would pop them in their mouths
to rehydrate them. Painter’s glue (called size) has been made from
horses’ hoofs, stags’ antlers, and rabbit’s skin, it is still made from
animal hides. Paint has been mixed with beeswax, the milky juice
of figs, and resins from any number of exotic plants. Painters’
media have included dozens of European and Asian plants, oils
made of spices like rosemary and cloves, and even ground-up
fossilized amber.
Painters have always used outlandish methods, very much like
the alchemical methods of their day. Rubens and his
contemporaries boiled oil and lead into a stinking mixture called
black oil, which was stored in airtight containers. To extract the
particles of blue lapis lazuli from the colorless rock surrounding
it, painters used the “pastille process”: they pulverized ore
samples in a bag, mixed them with melted wax, plant resins, and
various oils, and then kneaded the bag under a solution of lye
(made with wood ashes) to coax out the blue particles. 11 (The
method works, but according to the sober voice of modern
chemistry it does not require any of the exotic oils and waxes.)
Lead White, the best white paint before the nineteenth century,
was made by putting cast “buckles” of lead in clay pots partly
filled with vinegar; the pots were stacked in a shed with
fermenting horse manure or waste tanning bark. Every few weeks
the painter’s assistant would scrape the leprous flakes of lead
carbonate off the buckles and put them back for more steeping. 12
Even traditional tempera painting, the mainstay of the early