[214] I have mentioned the antique picture before, that proves that the ancient Italians horsed the boys and used the rod, just as was done ten years ago in England (and may be still in remote counties), as the best way of improving the memory. I have the authority of Pausanias, that boys used strings to set off their tops, and that young ladies played at what Scotch children call chuckie stanes, in Old Greece.

[215] Pantænus, the brother of Phidias, used a plaster or stucco in the Temple of Minerva at Elis, mixed with milk. This should be something like the beautiful marble-like stucco or chunam-work of India. I once saw a floor laid at Madras, among the materials of which were jaggree, or coarse sugar water and milk. Ram Raz, in his treatise on Hindu Architecture, says:

“Chunam, intended for fine plastering and ornamental works, is ground by women on an oblong granite stone, and a cylindrical upper stone about four inches in diameter; the mixture is sometimes ground two, three, and four times, to bring it to the required fineness and purity. In all the operations of chunam-work, jaggery water, i. e. a solution of molasses or coarse sugar, is invariably added by the builders, and its use appears to have prevailed from the remotest ages. There are various opinions among the modern practitioners regarding its usefulness, but those who have had the most extensive practice in building hold it as an indispensable ingredient in the formation of a durable and hard cement; and it is stated that the operator evidently perceives the dissolvent property of the jaggery water, on its being tempered with the prepared mortar.”

[216] I must make an undignified, though I believe an intelligible, comparison—the plaster is very like that applied to wooden dolls of the old school, and which children used to call alabaster. I believe it was made of finely pounded marble, and was largely used in the manufacture of Saints for Roman Catholic churches.

[217] Our sycamore is a maple, and its fruit is not eatable.

[218] Book xiii. ch. 7.

[219] Book xvi. ch. 39.

[220] Theophrastus died B.C. 208 years, at the age of 107.

[221] Cennino Cennini trattato della Pittura, ch. 6.

[222] In the 13th book and 12th chapter of Pliny’s Natural History, he tells us the size or paste used by bookbinders was made with fine wheaten flour, boiling water, and a little vinegar, which is our common shoemaker’s paste. And in book xi., chapter 39, we learn that the stronger glue was made, as now, of the hides of cattle boiled down. He says bull’s hide makes the strongest glue. The ancients seem to take some strange things for granted. A bull is stronger than a cow—therefore—his hide makes stronger glue. An English mechanic would have tried the experiment.

[223] This tallies with Erasmus’ description of English houses at nearly the same period, in one of his letters.

[224] This white is phosphate of lime.

[225] The tool, and the outline produced by it, were no doubt legitimately descended from the antique Cestrum and Skiagrum of Fuseli. There is an unfinished picture by Giovanni Bellini, in the Florence Gallery, in which the white ground on the board is visible. The marks of the tool are also distinct, a little indented, and the shadowed part is hatched. Over this there is a brown transparent colour, which has thickened in the indented lines and hatchings, rendering the lines darker; had he hatched again through the transparent ground to the white ground in the lights, we should have had, as I conceive, a perfect monochrome.

[226] In his Histoire de la Peinture Ancienne, wherein he has printed what he calls the thirty-fifth book of Pliny, with his translation; but he has left out what pleased him, and inserted other parts of the work, and omitted the numbering of the chapters, so as to render it difficult to detect his want of fidelity.

[227] Book XXXV. ch. 7. A passage in one of Horace’s Satires describes pictures, whether on cloth or wood, suspended at the entrances to the public shows at Rome, nearly as we should now describe the pictures exhibited for the same purposes by Gingel and his ingenious brethren, to invite spectators to their itinerant playhouses, and such as the lamented Pidcock used to allure them to the shows of elephants and tigers.

[228] In the original the painter’s name is mentioned; it is Pausias of Sicyon.

[229] Pliny, Natural History, Book xiii. ch. 11.

[230] Libri sacri scritti in tela di lino, sorta di volumi antichissimi molte di quali vide Frontone custoditi in Anagni.—Micali. Storia degli Antichi Popoli Italiani, page 32.

In Wilks’ History of the South of India, there is an account of the cudduttum, curruthum, or currut, used as books in that province. It is a strip of cotton cloth, covered on both sides with a mixture of paste and charcoal. The writing is done with a pencil of lapis ollaris, called balopium, and may be rubbed out like that on a slate; the cloth is folded in leaves like a pocket-map, and tied up between thin boards painted and ornamented. This mode of writing was anciently used for records and other public papers, and in some parts of the country is still employed by merchants and shopkeepers. It is very durable, indeed probably more so than either paper, parchment, or the palm leaf. Colonel Wilks supposes it to be the linen or cotton cloth on which Arrian states that the Indians wrote.

[231] Pliny contradicts himself on the subject of parchment. In b. xxxv. he says that Parrhasius painted or drew upon it; but b. xii. c. 10, he ascribes the invention of it to Eumenes, king of Pergamos, who lived after the time of Parrhasius, saying that he invented parchment because Ptolemy, king of Egypt, had prohibited the exportation of paper made of the papyrus. I cannot help believing that parchment was known before the time of Eumenes. He may have improved it, and hit upon a method of rendering it more fit for writing upon.

[232] Giotto was born in 1276; his master, Cimabue, in 1240; his gigantic Madonnas are painted on wood. I had no opportunity of examining whether there was linen under the plaster ground. Margaritone was born about 1250; Gaddo Gaddi, 1239, or thereabouts.

[233] The Venetians, owing to their commerce with the East, are the most likely of all the Italians to have been influenced by the practice handed down by the Greek painters; and we first find the general use of canvass, especially of very large size, at Venice.

[234] Colonel Leake’s Topography of Athens. Additional notes on the temple of Theseus, p. 400.

[235] Taylor’s Plato—Phædo. The twelve colours are not named, but further on there is the expression, “all the objects are rendered beautiful through various colours—purple of wonderful beauty, golden hue, pure white, emerald,” &c.

[236] Carbonate of lead, with a proportion of oxide.

[237] Some of the pictures in the Campo Santo at Pisa have suffered lamentably from the neglect of this caution. The high lights have become absolutely black.

[238] See Pliny, book xxxiii. end of ch. 12, and the whole of ch. 13.

[239] In the manufactory of porcelain, japan-ware, &c., it is much used. Perhaps Caligula’s chemists flattered him, by pretending to find gold in the orpiment.

[240]

Pope’s Iliad, book ii.

[241] I have seen the poor gods of the Hindoos of low caste thus rouged.

[242] About the year of Rome 249.

[243] Cinabrese is praised by Armenino, who wrote in 1600. I do not always mention Armenino when I might; 1st, because I prefer Cennino’s authority; 2nd, because Armenino is a coxcomb whose work I have no pleasure in; and 3rd, because it is useless to multiply quotations. However, he is a writer of value on these matters.

[244] Minium—red oxide of lead.

[245] The ancients believed that it was really the blood of dragons, which had sucked the blood of elephants, and had died, crushed under the weight of that enormous quadruped.

[246] Dragon’s blood is the resin of the “Dracæna draco” of Linnæus. The resin itself is opaque and brittle. The powder is of a crimson colour, insoluble in water. With us it is soluble both in alcohol and in the fixed oils; the ancients, as they had not alcohol, may have used it with oil.

This was probably the crimson colour which the Frenchman, mentioned in the little account of Pompeii, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge, bought of the workmen employed in excavating the town, and used with success as a body colour. He does not appear to have analysed it, or in any way endeavoured to ascertain its nature, for the benefit of art. See vol. ii., p. 56.

[247] See note to p. 8.

[248] The colour of the mantle of the Ganymede in the ancient fresco belonging to Sir M. W. Ridley looks like discoloured lake.

[249] Sir Humphrey Davy, in his paper in the first part of the volume of the Philosophical Transactions for 1815, on the colours used in painting by the ancients, says, that the artificial blue found in the baths of Titus is a frit made by means of soda, and coloured with oxide of copper. He imagines it to have been the blue invented by an ancient king of Egypt mentioned in the text, and the same also with that cœrulium, the art of making which was brought from Egypt to Puteoli, by Vestorius. That was made by heating together sand, flower of nitre, i. e. soda, and filings of copper.

[250] Certain balls of a fine blue colour have been brought from the Egyptian tombs since Sir Humphrey Davy’s paper was written. I do not know whether they have been analysed, but their appearance is like that of the frit found in the baths of Titus.

[251] She was of the Lusignan family, and is buried at Assisi.

[252] It is to be regretted that Baron Bertholdy did not live to complete and publish his essay on the glass and paste of the ancients, as applied to the production of cameos, intaglios, &c., in imitation of true gems. He had collected a great mass of materials, and had had some very beautiful specimens engraved. Among other fragments, I saw in his possession, in 1819, several handles of drinking-cups, on which the maker’s name and place of residence, namely, Sidon, were stamped before the glass was cold, some in Greek, some in Roman letters.

Mr. Hatchet has analysed many of the ancient glasses and pastes; but he did not find cobalt in any of them. In some very ancient beads found in one of the oldest tombs of Egypt, he found the colouring matter was manganese. Yet Davy speaks of a blue glass which appeared to him to be tinged with cobalt as common among the ruins of Rome; and says, moreover, that on analysing different ancient transparent blue glasses, he had found cobalt in all of them.

[253] Pliny, book xxxiii. ch. 5.

[254] Borax is a salt with excess of soda. The ancients used it as we do, as a flux, and a solder for metals.

[255] Also used by shoemakers to blacken leather shoes.

[256] Most probably Indian ink.

[257] Purple dye, the purple of Puteoli, was not procured simply from the shell-fish, but was mixed with the juice of madder and the megalob berries. Hence, probably, the superior quality of the pigment.

[258] Sandyx is a colour procured by calcining common ruddle and sandarach together. Sandarach is a red substance found near, and in silver mines. An island in the Red Sea produced a great deal. Sandarach is also gum from the juniper, but Pliny means the mineral.—Book xxxv. ch. 6. Virgil, however, must mean the juniper when he says, that browsing upon sandarach rendered the fleeces of the sheep red.

[259] The early establishment of the manufacture of glass and the beautifully coloured Venetian beads in Murano, where a remnant of the art still exists, I think warrants my supposition. The Queen of Cyprus’s gift of ultramarine to the church of Assisi, may be taken as a proof, that so late as 1300 the island had not lost its colour manufactures.

[260] This was later by four years than his examination of the colours found in the baths of Titus, the paper upon which in the Philosophical Transactions I have quoted.

[261] The word vernix (varnish) was entirely unknown to the ancients. Lyttleton, in his Latin Dictionary, says it is derived from the fact, that in the spring, ver, the juniper, begins to yield its resin; and that juniper, or gum sandarach, was the first substance from which true varnish was prepared. He ought to have added in Europe: for certainly true varnish was used in China long before the period at which he places the first use of the word vernix, and, as will appear by the text, I have no doubt that the thing, if not the name, was known by our ancients in Europe also.

[262] Supposed the Penæa sarcocolla; the gum is in the form of small whitish grains, of a bitter sweetish taste; it is almost entirely soluble in water.

[263] Supposed to be produced by a species of ferula. It is soluble in water and in vinegar.

[264] The resin of the juniper.

[265] Pliny, b. xxxv. ch. 15.

[266] Pliny’s account of ampelitis appears to agree with that given by Field, in his Book on Colours, of some specimens of native asphaltum, brought to him direct from Persia. It did not dissolve with oil or turpentine, but ground well with drying oil, and made a fine colour.

For ampelitis, see Pliny, b. xxxv. c. 16.

[267] A boat, or ship-builder, when he pays the bottoms of his vessels with boiling pitch, is really painting in the encaustic manner.

[268] B. xxxii. ch. 7. The word here translated waxed cloths, is literally candles; but, as candles were made of wax, I adhere to Holland’s expression, as giving Pliny’s meaning.

[269] B. xxi. ch. 14. The wax so coloured was the finest white punic wax; we must not forget that waxen images were among those exhibited in funeral processions.

[270] In his quotations from Vitruvius and Pliny he unaccountably translates red wax for Punic wax. Now Pliny says expressly that Punic wax was the whitest of all, and particularly describes the manner of bleaching it.

[271] The work of Theophilus was composed certainly not later than A. D. 1000, probably earlier; that of Heraclius, de Artibus Romanorum, was written about the same period. Raspe published Theophilus under the title of “Theophilus Monacus de omni scientia artis pingendi, e codice manuscripto Collegii Trinitatis Cantabrigiensis.”

[272] Linseed oil does not dry well without management, any more than the nut oils. Theophilus directs that it should be simmered in a new pipkin over a slow fire (but by no means boil), till one-third was evaporated; then powdered fornice, i.e. resin from the pitch-tree, stirred in; and observes, that every kind of painting glazed with this becomes glossy and durable. Thus the simple oil varnish was known and used at least as early as the eleventh century, four hundred years before the Van Eycks.

A ground, named by Theophilus, and afterwards by Cennino, for cementing panel, was composed of powdered lime and cheese,—the chief ingredients, if I am not mistaken, of Vancouver’s and other strong cements.

[273] Venice turpentine, perhaps.

[274] A term now, I believe, only used in heraldry, either in English or French. In Rome they now make pencils of the fine hair of kids.