on the colours used in painting by the Ancients. 105 
Pliny says, namely, that the palest kind of orpiment re- 
sembles sandarach, and from the line of Naevius, one of the 
most ancient Latin poets, “ Merula sandaracino ore:*' so that 
this colour must have been a bright yellow similar to that of 
the beak of the blackbird.* Dioscorides describes the best 
( rxvtyuxv as approaching in colour to vermilion, -f and the 
Greeks probably always applied this term to minium ; but the 
Romans seem to have used it in a different sense ; and some 
confusion was natural when different colours were prepared 
from the same substance by different degrees of calcination. 
I have not detected the use of orpiment in any of the ancient 
fresco paintings ; but a deep yellow approaching to orange, 
which covered a piece of stucco in the ruins near the monu- 
ment of Caius Cestius, proved to be oxide of lead, and con- 
sisted of massicot mixed with minium. It is probable, that 
the ancients used many colours from lead of different tints be- 
tween the usta of Pliny, which was our minium, and imper- 
fectly decomposed ceruse, or pale massicot. 
The yellows in the Aldobrandini picture are all ochres. I 
examined the colours in a very spirited picture, on the wall of 
one of the houses at Pompeii, of a lion and a man, they all 
proved to be red and yellow ochres. 
IV. Of the blue colours of the Ancients. 
Different shades of blue are used in the different apartments 
of the baths of Titus, and several very fine blues exist in the 
mixtures of colours to which I have referred in the last two 
sections. 
These blues are pale or darker, according as they contain 
* Histoire de la Peinture ancienne, page 199. f Lib. v. 1 22. 
MDCCCXV. P 
