by Emy
Hello everyone!
Have you ever wondered how ancient artists used to create those famous paintings that we can see today? As you might know, they couldn’t just use artificial pigments because those weren’t even a thing back then. They used natural pigments that they were able to find in the wild. Unfortunately, some of those pigments were highly toxic and were slowly causing deadly diseases. Today I want to introduce you to some of those silent killers.
“Emerald green” will be our first victim, this beautifully deep and extremely poisonous green colour was originally discovered in Germany around the year 1800 and quickly became a hit. It was everywhere in the oil paints, coach paints, watercolours, pastels, wax crayons even pencils. As years went by people started to be suspicious and finally did some tests on the pigment. “Real” Emerald green was banned in the early 1900s but we can safely use its artificial version. Green surely has the most experience in being the colour of toxins. Emerald green had its own cousin that is as beautiful as it is murderous and has a lovely name “paris green”. Paris green other known as 4Cu2+ was a light, cold hue of green found in France in 1814 by two chemists, Russ and Sattler, at the Wilhelm Dye and White Lead Company of Schweinfurt, Bavaria. It was banned around 1900s. Both of those green colours contain arsenic, that’s why in some of sources they are specified as the same pigment.
So far there have been/I have described? only green hues and it is time for a change. A sad change. This red hue that I will be describing now isn’t that deadly but it is still on shop shelves. It is called “Cadmium Red”, if I had to describe how it looks I would say that it looks like a “true red”. Its looks definitely “more reddish” than Scarlet or Rufous as strange as that may sound. Like I said before it is incomparably less toxic than any hues that I had already talked about but it is still dangerous, especially for full-time artists who work with it every day. And that's because the whole problem around this red is the fact that it can only cause disease if the body is exposed to it for a long time. By this, I mean that it is completely harmless to ordinary people and that's why it wasn't banned. Fun fact, one of the biggest art company released “no Cadmium” Cadmium red (it is actually called Cadmium-free red) but the paint itself did not look like the original.
Last one that I want to focus on is called “White Lead”. As we know, lead, is a highly toxic substance. It may shcok you but it turns out that we had known about it since 1700s but we still decided to make paint out of it. This genius idea came from Germany and it came to live thanks to a famous German painter, Vermeer. He used his invention to create unmatched chiaroscuro in his works of art. It was finally banned in 1992 after a long fight with artists who still wanted to use the “brightest white” even if it might kill them.
Of course, those aren’t all of the toxic paints that had been used through history of art. I want to shortly mention one of my favourite paints that didn’t kill a lot of people but were still classified as toxic. Those are “Tyrian purple” (a.k.a true purple), “Mummy brown” which was made from real mummies and “Indian yellow” made by feeding a certain cow a diet only on water and mango leaves.
That’s all for today!
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