Egyptian Blue Hiding in Mummy Portraits

[Aianawa]

Very interesting discovery imo > http://www.futurity.org/mummies-egyp...edium=referral



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Dusting off 15 Roman-era Egyptian mummy portraits—mostly untouched for 100 years—has revealed a 2,000-year-old surprise.

Researchers discovered that the ancient artists used the pigment Egyptian blue as material for underdrawings and for modulating color—a finding never documented before.

Because blue has to be manufactured, it typically is reserved for very prominent uses, not hidden under other colors.

“This defies our expectations for how Egyptian blue would be used,” says Marc Walton, research associate professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University.

“The discovery changes our understanding of how this particular pigment was used by artists in the second century AD. I suspect we will start to find unusual uses of this colorant in a lot of different works of art, such as wall paintings and sculpture.”

Hidden blue

The best Roman-era painters tried to emulate Greek painters, who were considered the masters of the art form. Before the Greek period, Egyptian blue was used everywhere throughout the Mediterranean—in frescoes, on temples, to depict the night sky, as decoration. But when the Greeks came along, their palette relied almost exclusively on yellow, white, black, and red.

“When you look at the Tebtunis portraits we studied, that’s all you see, those four colors,” Walton says. “But when we started doing our analysis, all of a sudden we started to see strange occurrences of this blue pigment, which luminesces. We concluded that although the painters were trying hard not to show they were using this color, they were definitely using blue.”

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