In this one part virgin wax is dissolved in two parts turpentine
with a few drops of boiled linseed oil. The pigments are ground
in boiled linseed oil with the addition of this medium. The plaster
ground, well dried, is soaked with hot boiled linseed oil diluted with
an equal quantity of turpentine. It is then grounded with several
coats of oil paint for a priming and smoothed with pumice stone.
The painting can be executed in a thin water colour technique or with
a full body, and dries lighter than when wet and with a dead surface.
§ 42. Encaustic Painting in general in Ancient and Modern Times.— (See Cros and Henry, L’Encaustique et les autres procédés de la peinture chcz les anciens, Paris, 1884; Flinders-Petrie, Hawara, &c., London, 1889; O. Donner v. Richter, Über Technisches in der Malerei der Alten, Munich, 1885; Berger, Beiträge zur Entwickelungs-Geschichte der Maltechnik, ii. 185 seq.; Munich, 1904).
Although in modern mural painting wax is employed to secure a matt surface, in ancient times it appears to have been valued rather from the depth and intensity it lent to colours when it was polished. It there represented an attempt to secure the same force and pictorial quahty which in modern times are gained by the use of the oil medium. We are told of it by the ancients that it was a slow and troublesome process, and the name of it, meaning “burning in,” shows that the inconvenience of a heating apparatus was inseparable from it; yet it seems at the same time to have been a generally accepted technique, and Greek writers from Anacreon to Procopius treat “wax” as the standard material for the painter. Nay more, hardly a day now passes without every one of us bearing testimony in the words he uses to the importance of the technique in antiquity. The Etymologicum magnum of the 12th century makes the process stand for painting generally (ἐγκεκαυμένη-ἐξωγραφημένη), and the name “encaustic” came to be applied not only to painting but also to sumptuous calligraphy. Then it was applied to writing in general, and the name still survives in the Italian inchiostro and our own familiar “ink” (Eastlake, Materials, i. 151).
The technique of ancient encaustic has given rise to much discussion which till recently was carried on chiefly on a literary basis. Fresh material has been contributed by the discovery, in the eighties of the 19th century, in Egypt of a series of portraits on mummy cases, executed for the most part in a wax process, and dating probably from the first two or three centuries A.D. Previous to this discovery there was little material of a monumental kind, though what appears to be the painting apparatus of a Gallo-Roman artist in encaustic was found in 1847 at St Médard-des-Prés in La Vendée, and has been often figured. It should be stated at the outset that the modern process of dissolving wax in turpentine or an essential oil like oil of spike was not known to the ancients, who however knew how to mix resinous substances with it, as in the case of ship-painting (Pliny xi. 16; Dioscorides i. 98). They also saponified wax by boiling it with potash so as to form what was called “Punic wax” (Pliny xxi. 84 seq.), and this emulsion may be reduced with water, and at the same time combines with oil and with size, gum, egg and other temperas. Wax, Pliny says, may be coloured and used for painting—ad edendas similitudines (loc. cit.); but as the name “encaustic” implies, and as we gather from another of Pliny’s phrases, ceris pingcre ac picturam inurere (xxxv. 122), heat was an essential part of the process. Hence the material must have been employed as a rule in a more or less solid form and liquefied each time for use, and not in the form of a diluted solution or emulsion which could be made serviceable cold. It is true that Punic wax mixed with a little oil is prescribed by Vitruvius (vii. 9, 3) as a solution for covering and locking up from the air a coat of the changeable pigment vermilion laid on a wall (see § 35), but the solution is used hot and driven in by application of a heating apparatus.
The accounts of the technique furnished to us by Pliny can
be brought into connexion with the actual remains, and Berger
and others have succeeded fairly well in imitating these by
processes evolved from the ancient notices. It is unfortunate
that the most important passage of Pliny (xxxv. 149) appears
corrupt. It runs in the received text as follows: Encausto pingendi duo fuere antiquitus genera, cera et in chore cestro, id est vericulo, donee classes pingi coepere. Hoc tertium accessit resolutes igni ceris penicillo utendi, quae pictura navibus nee sole nee sale ventisve corrumpitur. Here three kinds of encaustic painting
are mentioned, two old and one new (the comparative chronology
of the processes need not come into question), and in the two last
cases the distinction is that between two instruments of painting,
the cestrum and the penicillus or brush. It is natural to suggest
that instead of the word cera, which, as wax is the material
common to all encaustic processes, need not have been introduced
and on manuscript authority may be suspected, some word
for a third instrument of painting should be restored.
An image should appear at this position in the text.(From a photograph by W. A. Mansell & Co.)
Fig. 35.—Mummy of Artemidorus with painted portrait, inscribed “O Artemidorus, Farewell.” About A.D. 200 (Brit. Mus.).
Berger,
with some philological likelihood,
conjectures the word cauterio,
which means properly a “branding iron,” but which he believes to be
a sort of hollowed spatula or spoon
with a large and a small end by
which melted waxes of different
colours might be taken up, laid on
a ground, such as a wooden panel,
and manipulated in a soft state as
pictorial effect required. Instruments
of the kind were found in
the Gallo-Roman tomb in La
Vendée. The second kind of
painting with the cestrum or
vericulum was on ivory and
must have been on a minute
scale. The “cestrum” was certainly
a tool of corresponding size, and
some have seen in it a sort of point
or graver, such as that with which
the incised outlines were made on
the figured ivory plaques in the
Kertch room at St Petersburg
(see below); others a small lancet shaped
spatula Like the tools that
sculptors employ for working on
plaster. The brush, with which
melted waxes could be laid on in
washes, as was the case on ships,
needs no explanation.
An examination of the portraits from the mummy cases (see fig. 35) makes it quite clear that the brush was used with coloured melted waxes to paint in, in sketchy fashion, the draperies and possibly to under paint the flesh and hair, while the flesh was executed in a more pastos style, with waxes in a soft condition laid on and manipulated with some spatula like instrument, which we may if we like call “cauterium” or “cestrum.” The marks of such tool are on several of the heads unmistakably in evidence, and may be seen in specimens in the London National Gallery. There is a difference of opinion however as to the constitution of the wax. Donner von Richter holds that the wax was “Punic,” i.e. a kind of emulsion, and was blended with oil and resinous balsams so as to be transformed into a soft paste which could be manipulated cold with the spatula. Heat for “burning in” (picturam inurere) he thinks was afterwards applied, with the effect of slightly fusing and blending the coloured waxes that had been in this way worked into a picture. Berger, on the other hand, believes that the coloured wax pastes were manipulated hot with the “cauterium,” which would be maintained in a heated condition, and that there was no subsequent process of “burning in.” Flinders Petrie is of opinion that, even in the
