Excerpt from “Sensual Delectation” and Phenomenology in
Dan Christensen’s Calligraphic Stains & Scrapes, 1977 to 1984
By Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D.
One might ask if the tail is wagging the dog when it comes to chemistry and painting. Throughout human time, pigments and their possibilities have led artists to new forms of visuality and expression. This process stretches back to cave and rock painters in many lands who blended, oxidized, and hydrated minerals quarried from rocks with liquid binding agents. With its beginnings in Crete in 2000 BCE, fresco emerged from mixtures of sand, lime, and water, leading to Renaissance walls covered with stories still “read” today. Cennino Cennini’s (c. 1360 - c. 1427) fifteenth-century painting handbook, Il libro dell’arte, could almost be a chemistry manual. For example, it contains instructions for the compounds to be used in oil and fresco colors, including giallorino, a manufactured yellow comprised of an oxide of lead “pounded in a bronze mortar” and cinabrese, made of “the handsomest and lightest sinoper”—an earth pigment— that could be mixed with lime white for skin tones. In the late 1860s, the emergence of French Impressionist plein-air painting relied on pre-mixed oil pigments sold in portable metal tubes, including expensive cadmium colors; on discovering cadmium in 1817, the German chemist Friedrich Stromeyer pronounced more prophetically than he could have imagined: “It promises to be useful in painting.”
