Tom Metcalfe, Contributor
December 3, 2021
(Inside Science) -- Renaissance painters had it hard. They couldn't just visit their local arts store to buy paint in whatever colors they wanted. Instead, they had to make their paints by combining dry pigments with a binding medium to make the paint stick. And one popular binding material was an ingredient you might expect to find in the kitchen instead of the artist's studio: the humble egg.
Egg seems an odd substance to paint with, but its use has a long history. As Western art began to flourish in the late Middle Ages, painters found that protein-rich egg yolk worked almost perfectly to fix natural pigments to wood panels, dry plaster, and canvas, but plain water didn't. "As soon as an artist paints with a pigment in water, the water evaporates -- you're left with powder on the surface and it falls off," said Spike Bucklow, a professor of material culture at the University of Cambridge.
From about the 13th century, painters in northern Europe favored paints bound with oils. But egg-based paints -- known as egg tempera -- remained widely used in Italy for hundreds of years, Bucklow said, possibly because the technique was by then well-established. As a result, many of the most famous Italian artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Raphael Sanzio, painted with eggs.
Now, a new study published in the journal Angewandte Chemie has revealed details of this venerable technique...
