Painting reveals roots of Raphael’s blue-sky thinking
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.
However, non-invasive analysis of The Triumph of Galatea, one of his frescoes, has shown that Raphael used Egyptian blue and knew how to make it from instructions 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.
The painting, which is 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 ops named Polyphemus murdered the shepherd epherd using a rock, with his blood turning into a river.
The blue pigment was known wn to the ancient Egyptians 3,000 00 years before the birth of Christ, st, but fell out of use at the end of the Roman era and was then n replaced with paint made from m lapis lazuli, a semi-precious us stone.
“In the 1500s, Egyptian blue ue had not been seen for centuries, es, so to find it in this painting is s an extraordinary discovery,” said Antonio Sgamellotti, an art histoistorian who is the curator of Raphael hael in Villa Farnesina: Galatea & Psyche, a new exhibition. “We didn’t dn’t expect to find it because it had been forgotten for so long.”
The painter learnt how w to make Egyptian blue from ancient records written by Vitruvius, a Roman architec architect, engineer and author whose analysis of proportion in the human body inspired Leonardo da Vinci’s draw drawing Vitruvian Man.
V Vitruvius described how to ma make Egyptian blue, which the Romans Ro knew as caeruleum, in a treatise tr called De Architectura. T The recipe involved mixing sand with copper and saltpetre and baking it in a furnace. “Egyptian blue is an artificial pigment pi with a copper base,” said Pr Prof Sgamellotti. “It has a special ch characteristic in that it gives a wo wonderful luminescence when ligh light falls on it.”
T The fact that Raphael went to the trouble of resuscitating such a lon long-forgotten pigment reflected his deep interest in the ancient wo world, said Prof Sgamellotti.
T The exhibition in Villa Farnesina will run until January.