The standard blue pigment for the Renaissance and on, until about 1710, it was used in many Old Masters before disappearing by 1800.
Tintoretto
A beautiful, intense green used by the van Eycks, Tintoretto, Domenichino, and Renoir, it was never popular in oil paints, and quietly died out.
Arsenic sulphides, they were both used in alchemy, and used commonly in paintings from Ancient Egypt through to the late 29th century. Tintoretto loved them.
Was she abducted, seduced, or seducer? Victim or whore? Ovid’s pair of letters between Helen and Paris raises questions which many artists have tried to tackle.
What turns statues and copper roofs blue-green? ‘Copper rust’, the basis of the intense green pigment Verdigris, used by all the Masters.
Used since Roman times, it was common in the dress of saints. Highly toxic, it was progressively replaced by cadmium red in the late 19th century.
In the year ahead, Gustav Klimt, Ferdinand Hodler, Tintoretto, Egon Schiele, and several others: anniversaries which I will celebrate here.
How a maidservant brings a protracted labour to a successful conclusion, the origin of the Milky Way, and an infant who strangles serpents for fun.
A lighter and formerly very popular story brings to light some masterly paintings, including a superb work by Jan Brueghel the Elder.
Rich in wordplay, this story is almost unique to Ovid. It was oddly prescient of his own later banishment too.
The Eclectic Light Company 