![]() Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), A Sibyl and a Prophet (c 1495), distemper and gold on canvas, 56.2 x 48.6 cm, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH. Silverpoint draws with silver metal wire, and lays down grey lines which appear faint at first but deepen in tone with time. Wikimedia Commons.īotticelli’s Map of Hell from 1480-90 uses an unusual combination of glue tempera with silverpoint and ink. Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), Map of Hell (1480-90), silverpoint, ink and distemper, 33 x 47.5 cm, Biblioteca Apostólica Vaticana, Vatican City. Although it’s now well over half a millennium old, and its colours have sadly faded, it’s well worth seeking out when you next visit The National Gallery in London. ![]() Wikimedia Commons.ĭieric Bouts’ The Entombment from about 1450 was painted using glue tempera on linen. Dieric Bouts (c 1420–1475), The Entombment (c 1450), glue tempera on linen, 87.5 x 73.6 cm, The National Gallery, London. In the early Renaissance, some artists used glue tempera extensively, and with great success, although surviving works have not aged as well as those painted using egg tempera or oils. ![]() Relatively poor protection of light-sensitive pigments, commonly leading to fading of colour over time. ![]() Hardening of the glue binder is not the result of a stable polymerisation, as with oil paints, and can readily be reversed. Solution on re-wetting, so it can easily be reworked like watercolour, but is unsuitable for any unintended exposure to water or damp.Mechanical fragility of the paint layer, making it particularly susceptible to abrasion and cracking.‘Drying light’, undergoing a marked colour change as the paint dries, reducing the intensity of chroma.It has proved to suffer several limitations, including: Glue tempera was used in antiquity, and outside Europe remains in widespread use. I here use the term glue tempera to include them all, as glue is the essential binder, and the addition of chalk or lime primarily makes them opaque, and contributes relatively little to the mechanical properties of the paint layer. These represent a spectrum of paints, ranging from those in which only glue and pigment are used, to others which also incorporate substantial amounts of powdered chalk or lime, and are related to whitewash. Being ancient in origin, different combinations of binder, pigment, and other substances developed, and these have left a confusion of terms, including glue tempera, and distemper. These proved to be suitable as the binder for paints. The raw materials either came from boiling animal bones, hide, and other offal, or from natural exudates of plants. The binder determines the paint’s properties, both during application and its drying and longevity.įor example, in oil paints the binder is a drying oil such as linseed, which polymerises with oxygen from the air to form a robust paint layer, diluents are usually organic solvents such as turpentine and its substitutes, and there’s a vast range of different pigments.Īt some stage in the distant past, our ancestors discovered that processing some natural products created glues. At its most basic, artists’ paint consist of three components: a binder to form the paint layer and stick it to the ground, diluent to control the viscosity of the paint (which normally evaporates soon after application), and pigment.
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