What is encaustic painting ?

Let me start by saying that I consider encaustic the most beautiful and comprehensive painting technique man has ever used. But it is also the most ill-fated. It requires beeswax and fire.
Encaustic: “to burn in”.
Encaustic painting: the process of applying molten, colored wax layers to various surfaces using fire.
Encaustic is also sometimes referred to as the process of applying wax to paintings or wooden and marble surfaces to give them a glossy or protective finish. However this is not the truest sense of the term.
Over my long career I have worked with many different surfaces, and although I have been using pigments such as vermillion, alizarin crimson, minium, etc., which are not suitable for buon fresco, I did use them without any problems on wet, fresh plaster (created mixing sand and slaked lime) and on many other types of supports, such as dry fresco, marble, canvas, wood and terracotta.
Have you ever wondered why fresco painters inspired by Master Painters like Michelangelo, Raffaello, Domenichino, Veronese and many others never used pure colors like Vermillion or Ivory White as background? Or glazes such as Alizarin? The reason is simple: these colors are not compatible with the causticity of mortar. Yet, in the 2000-year-old ancient homes of Rome and Pompeii some frescos display those beautiful blacks and reds used as background.
How can this be possible? Is it magic? Of course not. It’s encaustic and its spin-off techniques.
Of all painting techniques, encaustic is the one with the least rules and difficulties.
Here are just a few:
· be sure to buy good waxes (their place of origin is very important), purify and bleach them in a natural way
· create your own tools: china, terracotta or enamel pots, one for each color you use, iron tools in different shapes and sizes provided with wooden handles to prevent burns.
This was just a short introduction to introduce you to the fascinating and mysterious world of encaustic painting.

Rome 02/20/2007
 

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Origins of Albano
(Encaustic on wet plaster 170x100 cm)
Guarded in the municipality of Albano Italy

The magic of Encaustic
"We don’t know who first conceived encaustic, the technique of painting with molten wax and applying heat afterwards.
Some believe it was Aristeides’ invention, which was supposedly improved by Praxiteles, but there are encaustic paintings which date further back in time... Pamphilos, Apelles’ master, is well known not only because he painted in encaustic, but also because he taught this technique..." - This is the Roman historian Pliny the Elder mentioning Praxiteles, Apelles and other great Greeks from the 4th century BC in his Naturalis Historia.
What he doesn’t know is that encaustic was not invented in Greece, but rather a thousand years before in the land of Pharaohs - Egypt.
The year 79 AD is close at hand, Mount Vesuvius is about to wipe out Pompeii, Herculaneum and Pliny himself. The admiral of the Roman fleet has gone too far indeed - he wanted to see the two towns close up, as they died under layers of ash.
From the Nile Valley, encaustic spreads to Greece and finally to Rome, where Augustus has two encaustic paintings immured into the walls of the Roman Curia and Tiberius is reported to have paid six million sesterces for a portrait of a young man.
Encaustic paintings also enriched Livia’s house and Nero’s Domus Aurea.
With the decline of the Roman empire and the beginning of the barbaric invasions, encaustic falls into disuse and eventually disappears in Carolingian times.
It wanes in Egypt as well, leaving behind the fascinating Fayum portraits as its last evidence. It is later revived in 1503 in Florence, during the Renaissance, when the Signoria, the city’s governing authority, decides to celebrate the war victories against the towns of Anghiari and Cascina with two paintings to be made on the walls of Palazzo Vecchio’s most imposing chamber - the Salone dei Cinquecento.
Gonfalonier Piero Soderini hires two local artists to do the job, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo happens to have read the first translated edition of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, made by Lorenzo Ghiberti (who also made the doors of the Battistero), and since he wants to amaze his rival Buonarroti and the whole city of Florence, he decides to take on the ancient technique of encaustic.
To paint the huge 33" x 66" surface he needs to mix pigments with molten wax and eventually uses fire to fix them on the plaster.
The wall’s moisture, however, makes the colors unstable.
In an attempt to dry it, Leonardo lights big fires, but heat melts the wax and makes it drip.
He gives up.
Today, neither Leonardo’s encaustic painting nor Michelangelo’s fresco are to be found in the Salone dei Cinquecento.
As far as Leonardos’s "Battle of Anghiari" is concerned, only copies of its central part, the "Battle of the Standard", made by other painters survived to the present day.
Encaustic thus wanes once again.
It is rediscovered two centuries later, thanks to the first archaeological excavations in Pompeii.
Many artists and experts try to replicate the magic of those colors, which had been buried for centuries and yet were so vivid.
The French Academy advertises a competition.
In 1755, an aristocrat - one Count Caylus - brings forward a mixture of color, wax and potash to be kept warm in order for it to be applied to a warm surface and then shaped with a brush.
In 1784, one abbot Vincenzo Requeno is reported to a have concocted his own recipe, whereas Philipp Hackert tries to paint in encaustic the King of Naples’ bathroom.
Many other solutions are put forward, but none of them proves to be the right one.
Until Michele Paternuosto finally comes into the picture.
"Spellbound", his lifelong passion arising from his frequent visits to Pompeii - the great archive of Roman paintings which astonishingly survived up to the present day - he tries out various possibilities until finally, by trial and error, he succeeds where the others failed.
"Sheer luck", he says.
He elaborates on his research, lost alchemies, vine black produced by charring desiccated grape vines, on Apelles calling ivory black Elephantinum, on the frit of Alexandria, on Brutian pitch, ceruse, vermillion...
On Arabs mixing colors with saffron or pomegranate juice to dye leather yellow...
On ancient colors such as azurite, indigo and Purpurissum... which Pliny separated in "austere" e "florid".
Paternuosto also mentions his first visit to Pompeii - he was still a child when his father took him to the Villa dei Misteri, a villa containing some of the most remarkable murals of ancient times.
"We didn’t have a TV set, and in my hometown there were no movie theaters.
Today kids have Harry Potter... but Pompeii’s magic was real...".
Magic - this is our key to the understanding of Michele Paternuosto, a man who, from that day back in Pompeii, never broke his relationship with encaustic.
He had no academic qualification to guide him, just passion, insight and patient apprenticeship.
Like ancient Master Painters - like someone who has built up such a thorough knowledge of his craft, that he makes the finished work look easy.
This is mastery, indeed.
Why encaustic and not fresco? "Fresco is more spontaneous, it’s faster - explains Paternuosto - encaustic, on the other hand, is more thoughtful, more vivid.
And yet, we risk to lose it forever. I’ve read that every day, many languages are lost all over the world - he adds - and that if things are left unchanged, two hundred years from now we will all be speaking just English and Chinese.
Why, that would be a great loss. The same thing could happen to encaustic.
And it wouldn’t be fair. We have to do something.
All we need is to teach encaustic in art schools, in Rome or maybe in Pompeii...".
Just a wild flight of fancy: what if Leonardo could have painted the "Battle of Anghiari" under the supervision of an encaustic teacher?
"Who knows? Leonardo chose the wrong method, he shouldn’t have heated the wall, but rather his tools.
If the ground is properly done, wax withstands temperatures up to 212° F / 100° C.
In Pompeii it didn’t melt.
The origin of the wax, that is bee pastures, is also crucial.
For example, you can’t find good waxes in Rome.
Good places can be found in the area around the Vesuvius or further south, in the former Magna Graecia, in Greece and in Mediterranean countries.
According to Pliny, wax must be dipped in seawater, mixed with white liquor and then left in the moon...
If it doesn’t sublimate, if it doesn’t turn as white as snow, the wax is not good.”
Did Leonardo know all this? ...Perhaps he missed something.