Bone White Odd Facts in Art History
Before mass productions of oil paint, artists had to make their own colors. When I was attending a class a Ringling Museum the art historian told us about how artists invented the colors they needed by experimentation and just about anything was game! In the days of castles and royalty it was the custom to throw your bones from dinner down for the dogs. The gnawed bones were thrown into the fire and cracked. They were then ground up into a fine paste and a flux added. And that is how the name bone white came into being. Artists used rotted cheese, green mold, and sea urchins among other things. There are certain colors that you may see in medieval paintings cannot be recreated because some of the mollusks are extinct or the source of experimentation was unknown. Next we will speak of rabbit glue.
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| Rembrandt's Dog from google image |
Before mass productions of oil paint, artists had to make their own colors. When I was attending a class a Ringling Museum the art historian told us about how artists invented the colors they needed by experimentation and just about anything was game! In the days of castles and royalty it was the custom to throw your bones from dinner down for the dogs. The gnawed bones were thrown into the fire and cracked. They were then ground up into a fine paste and a flux added. And that is how the name bone white came into being. Artists used rotted cheese, green mold, and sea urchins among other things. There are certain colors that you may see in medieval paintings cannot be recreated because some of the mollusks are extinct or the source of experimentation was unknown. Next we will speak of rabbit glue.
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