The Triumph of Galatea by Raphael
Credit: Getty
The Renaissance painter Raphael used a rare type of pigment invented by the ancient Egyptians in one of his masterpieces, scientists have discovered.
Until now, it was thought that knowledge of the pigment, known as Egyptian blue, was lost with the fall of the Roman Empire.
But non-invasive spectograph analysis of one of his frescoes, The Triumph of Galatea, has shown that Raphael used Egyptian blue and knew how to make it from instructions that had been written down by the Romans.
In the masterpiece, which he completed around 1512-1514, he used the rich blue pigment to depict the sky, sea and even the eyes of human figures.
A detail from Raphael's painting, The Triumph of Galatea
Credit: Getty
The painting, which is held in a grand palazzo in Rome called Villa Farnesina, depicts the Greek mythological story of Galatea, a nymph who fell in love with a peasant shepherd called Acis. She is shown riding in a shell pulled by two dolphins.
Jealous of the affair, a cyclops named Polyphemus murdered the shepherd by throwing a pillar at him, with his blood turning into a river.
The blue was known to the ancient Egyptians 3,000 years before the birth of Christ, but fell out of use at the end of the Roman era and was then replaced with paint made from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone.
“In the 1500s, Egyptian blue had not been seen for centuries, so to find it in this painting is an extraordinary discovery,” said Antonio Sgamellotti, an art historian who is the curator of a new exhibition, Raphael in Villa Farnesina. “We didn’t expect to find it because it had been forgotten for so long.”
The painter learned how to make Egyptian blue from ancient records written by Vitruvius, a Roman architect, engineer and author whose analysis of proportion in the human body inspired Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing Vitruvian Man.
Leonardo's Vitruvian Man
Vitruvius described how to make Egyptian blue, which the Romans knew as caeruleum, in a treatise called De Architectura.
The recipe involved mixing sand with copper and saltpeter and baking it in a furnace. “Egyptian blue is an artificial pigment with a copper base,” said Prof Sgamellotti. “It has a special characteristic in that it gives a wonderful luminescence when light falls on it.”
The fact that Raphael went to the trouble of resuscitating such a long-forgotten pigment reflected his deep interest in the ancient world, said Prof Sgamellotti.
Egyptian blue eventually fell out of favour because other materials such as lapis lazuli, while expensive, occurred naturally and did not have to be manufactured with a complex chemical process.
The finest lapis lazuli was imported by merchants from Afghanistan. In the medieval era it was used to produce ultramarine, a vivid blue that was used in the illustration of religious manuscripts.
Italy is commemorating the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death with a series of exhibitions, many of which had to be delayed when the country was hit by the coronavirus pandemic in March.
The exhibition in Villa Farnesina, which sits on the banks of the Tiber, will run until January.
The huge palazzo was built for a banker from Siena named Agostino Chigi, one of the richest men of his time. It was later acquired by the Farnese family.
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