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 ...
Two words — lawn dwarves. ;’)
Not to stir up a hornet’s nest, but decades ago, some genius at the British Museum decided that the Elgin Marbles (friezes that had been cut out of the Parthenon) needed to be sandblasted, because the statues should be pure white marble. So, the 2500 year old original paint job was removed.
Red barns came about because red paint is cheap. Farmhouses were fairly often not painted or stained at all; siding and other exterior wood technology was made of woods naturally resistant to decay. Alas, the old barns around here are gradually falling apart, unmaintained, because of the expense of painting, roofing, or routine repairs, vs construction of pole barns.
None of those statues have survived, even in part, which is too bad, really. I suspect that fragments of the bronze Colossus of Rhodes may still be found on the sea floor, although those have indeed been looked for. Apparently there’s a fairly current effort (again) to build a new C of R.
My wild guess is, the use of ivory on the large statues was limited, and a faux ivory made by some chemical process was used.
http://www.geopolymer.org/science/introduction
The Parthenon must have been quite something in its original paint. The Romans decorated their buildings too, which I sometimes forget because a couple of thousand years has worn so much paint off.
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