MINERALS IN ART AND ARCHEOLOGY — GETTENS 563 



1830, a method for artificial production of ultramarine was invented, 

 and following that, natural ultramarine nearly disappeared from the 

 artist's palette, although it can still be bought from an artists' color- 

 man in London. 



Azurite, the blue basic carbonate of copper, was probably used in 

 greater quantities by early European painters than lapis blue. 

 Sources of azurite in Europe are little known, but probably much of 

 it came from Hungary from copper mines that were long ago com- 

 pletely worked out. The early medieval writers called it azzurum 

 citramwinuin to distinguish it from azzumtn ultramarinum. In the 

 Far East, ground malachite (green) enjoyed the same wide use as 

 azurite, but for some obscure reason it was sparsely used in medieval 

 European painting. This is strange because malachite and azurite 

 generally occur together in secondary copper ore deposits, with mala- 

 chite in greater abundance. Both malachite and azurite pigment 

 were used plentifully m Chinese paintings on mud walls, on silk, and 

 on paper, going back to an early date. In China and Japan, the 

 powdered mineral was sieved to produce three tones of blue — dark, 

 medium, and light. The dark blue azurite on some Japanese screens 

 in the Freer Gallery of Art is so coarse that it feels like sandpaper. 

 An especially striking example of the lavish use of these two pig- 

 ments is on a pair of Japanese screens in the INIetropolitan Museum 

 of Art (pi. 8, fig. 1) ; the subject attributed to Korin (1661-1716) is 

 "Iris and Bridge." The blue iris flowers are painted with azurite 

 pigment, the leaves are malachite, and both color and texture are 

 superb. Occasionally a bright green pigment on ancient paintings 

 turns out to be chrysocolla (copper silicate) , not malachite. These two 

 minerals are so similar in outward appearance it is not likely that they 

 were known apart. 



The only stable bright yellow pigment available to the ancients was 

 the jonquil yellow sulphide of arsenic called orpiment. Although 

 poisonous and difficult to grind because of its platy nature, orpiment 

 was used in Persian and Indian miniature paintings of former cen- 

 turies. It is encountered occasionally on early European paintings, 

 especially on illuminated writings on parchment. The Egyptians, 

 and later the Copts, also used it. A probable early source was 

 Macedonia from which supplies are still obtained. Orange-red re- 

 algar, the other arsenic sulphide mineral, was also used, but ap- 

 parently to a much lesser extent. 



It was inevitable that cinnabar (mercuric sulphide), with its rich 

 vermilion red color and high opacity, should find early use as a paint 

 pigment. Ciimabar was well known to the Greeks and Romans, who 

 got it mainly from the Almaden mines of Spain, which are still the 

 world's most important producers of mercury. Pliny called it 

 minium, a name which in later centuries became fixed to red lead, an 



