Where the world’s rarest pigments dwell
Posted by staff / March 25, 2016
Walk into an art store today and a world of color is available that was unthinkable to artists of olden times, yet a key component of ensuring a lost painting treasure is just that requires a collection of those rare pigments. Enter the original purpose of the Harvard’s Forbes Pigment Collection.
Just how unusual are the specimens it contains? Here’s one that’ll put shivers up your spine:
Mummy Brown
“People would harvest mummies from Egypt and then extract the brown resin material that was on the wrappings around the bodies and turn that into a pigment. It’s a very bizarre kind of pigment, I’ve got to say, but it was very popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.”
Not a color that’s ever going to hit the clearance rack, eh?
The collection has continued to expand to include all the myriad of materials artists use in their works, from plastics to papers, yet we doubt our materials will ever surpass those of old in the awe department.
Full story at Fast Co Design via Presurfer.
Graphics credit: Canva
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