This Phoenician sculpture made of ivory was once gilded. Credit: Courtesy of Musée du Louvre/R. Chipault
Posted on 05/21/2013 7:20:42 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Ancient ivory carvings made by Phoenician artists some 3,000 years ago have long hidden a secret, even while being openly displayed in museums around the world: The sculptures were originally painted with colorful pigments, and some were decorated with gold...
These metals are found in pigments commonly used in antiquity, such as the copper-based pigment Egyptian blue or the iron-based pigment hematite. The metals are not normally in ivory nor in the soil where the artifacts were long buried, explains Ina Reiche, a chemist at the Laboratory of Molecular & Structural Archaeology, in Paris. Reiche led the research, which was performed on ivory originally unearthed in Syria and now held at Baden State Museum, in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Phoenicians were seafaring Semitic traders who pioneered the use of an alphabet later adopted in ancient Greece, and they controlled the valuable royal-purple pigment trade throughout the Mediterranean during the period 1500–300 B.C.
Scholars had suspected that Phoenician ivory sculptures might initially have been painted, but to date most studies had examined just a few spots on ivory surfaces, Reiche says. Her team used a synchrotron to do X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to analyze the entire surface of the artifacts with micrometer resolution, revealing the spatial distribution of the lost pigmentation.
“Knowledge of an object’s original appearance can help us understand why it was so visually powerful to ancient viewers,” says Benjamin W. Porter, an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley. And there are plenty of important objects to examine, he adds. “This technique is transferable to other kinds of ancient art whose pigments have been weathered, from the palace wall reliefs of the Assyrian empire to Egyptian tomb paintings to everyday ceramic vessels whose decorations have been worn.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cen.acs.org ...
This Phoenician sculpture made of ivory was once gilded. Credit: Courtesy of Musée du Louvre/R. Chipault
Ivory Carvings
http://www.varchive.org/schorr/ivory.htm
New Evidence for Ages in Chaos: The Age of Ivory
http://www.varchive.org/ce/newev.htm
Assuruballit: The Ivory Of Shalmaneser
http://www.varchive.org/ce/assuruballit.htm
Mycenaean Jewelry
http://www.varchive.org/schorr/jewelry.htm
The Religious Center of Mycenae
http://www.varchive.org/schorr/center.htm
The Scandal of Enkomi
http://www.varchive.org/dag/enkomi.htm
additional:
http://www.varchive.org/schorr/bronze.htm
http://www.varchive.org/ce/c14.htm
http://www.varchive.org/cor/edwards/6011ve.htm
http://www.varchive.org/cor/pfeiffer/420818vpfei.htm
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IIRC, Greek statues were also painted.
During a cultural anthropology class in college in the early 1970s, I learned that primitive people, and peasants worldwide, like bright painted colors which is why you see houses in Mexico painted bright yellows, blues, etc. As that view is not politically correct, it is likely no longer taught in college.
Ditto
Indeed and this really has nothing to do with being primitive. It has everything to do with being starved for color.
Barns are normally painted red because farmers living in a sea of green are visually starved for red. People need color.
The ancients who had the time and resources to decorate their items and public places with color were the sophisticates of their era.
True, but in the evolution of clothing dyes over long periods of time, subtle colors were eventually developed, but were at first so expensive, that only the rich could afford them. This lead to our present day look of light pastel colors seen among the clothing of “sophisticated” people and the bright colored clothing (and houses) of those who are not.
I have been told by several farmers and have read in several articles that the barns were painted red because that was the cheapest/longest lasting paint.
Have you ever stood in the nave of a a Gothic cathedral? It was a shock to me when studies uncovered the fact that those stone interiors had been painted!
When I was in Jr College the art teacher told us of the painted Greek statues. She said they probably looked like the Mexican Santos statues, very gaudy.
But then that was 1971.
***Barns are normally painted red because farmers living in a sea of green are visually starved for red.***
I read that farmers 160 years ago painted barns and schools red is because they mixed their own paint, and the cheapest powder paint pigment was red.
***the barns were painted red because that was the cheapest/longest lasting paint.***
There was some kind of milk based paint that lasted and lasted. Even today it will not come off if paint remover is applied to it.
My wife have a nice old oak table. It is painted black because her crazy great-aunt painted the beautiful oak with milk based red maybe 75 years ago.
IIRC, Greek statues were also painted.
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YUUUP , the Acropolis originally looked like a rainbow colored gay bath-house. Those greek “men” sure knew how to use color ,, artful interior dick-orators they were ...
Can gold be analyzed and determined where it originated from? Does all gold break down the same, or is it slightly different at a molecular level from location to location? It would be interesting to know where their gold came from. It would be fun to find out if some of it may have come from the Americas.
Interesting evolution of visual appreciation and consumption.
There’s an aspect I had not encountered.
Thanks!
Gold’s got a fairly high melting point (~1948 F) and is easy to separate from its ores; when found mingled with copper, the melting points are similar. And it’s no joke getting an ancient furnace that hot. Luckily, gold was often found (or at least used) in mostly pure form; the non-gold contaminants can be used to figure out the original locality, and that means the dating of the artifact is done by proxy data (typically, RC dating of organic materials from the mine, if there was one).
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