Do you know the hidden secrets behind the rare paints used in the world's most famous paintings?

When we admire world-famous paintings, we are always amazed by the charm and painting skills of these paintings. Especially the use of color in them always gives an indescribable mystery. Some of the paints used in these paintings are very difficult to buy in the market. Today I am going to talk about the dark history of the world's most famous paintings, and one of the most controversial pigments, the mummy brown pigment, which was extracted from mummies. Because the emergence of this pigment, also led to a significant reduction in the number of mummies in the world, it is said that the better the flesh of the mummies made out of the mummy brown is fuller and shinier. So what are the famous paintings that use these colors? Can it bring unexpected effects?

In the 16th century, painting became a mainstream art form at that time. After the Renaissance, various schools of painters emerged, and these painters used a pitch color in pursuit of a brown with a natural luster. This color production process is very complicated, is extracted from the Dead Sea of an oily substance, it is difficult to obtain, and the price is also very high, so there are pigment technicians began to look for alternative pigments, which may be a sudden whimsical people, want to try to look and brown is very close to the mummy dried body, can extract this brown? So they cut the mummified corpse into small pieces, then crushed them and mixed them with white asphalt. Unexpectedly, a very natural and shiny brown color was produced, which is mummy brown. This pigment has very good permeability, which is very suitable for showing the skin tone and shade of the figure and also can be drawn by another color blending to give a very realistic feeling of various skin tones, but his disadvantage is also obvious, the production process is not stable, and it is easy to crack after a long time. So if there is cracking of the skin of the characters in the famous paintings of the 17th-18th centuries, it is very likely that mummy brown was used.

The pigment was first mixed in secret but was later used by more and more painters and, fortunately, became available for sale. 172 years later, when it was officially sold in a Parisian art store, the 18th century was also the time when mummy brown became popular. The pigment appears in paint albums and can be seen as a visually intense brown that is suitable for all oil and watercolor paintings. And it was favored by the Pre-Raphaelite painters for its hue and texture, while some junior painters naturally gravitated towards it in pursuit of the same pigment as the famous artists.

This pigment soon became popular throughout the European continent. One, because of the high selling price of the same shade of asphalt as mummy brown, and two, because at the time, mummies were simply too good to obtain. In the perception of many people, they may think that only Egyptian pharaohs were mummified. Otherwise, it was a custom to be mummified after death in Egypt, whether poor or rich, and even many animals were mummified after death.

In the seventh century A.D., the Arabs invaded Egypt, they found in the land the unique burial of the Egyptians. Due to a long time of weathering, the resin on these mummies has turned into a black gelatinous substance, which looks the same as asphalt. So the Arabs called these mummies asphalt. At first, the Arabs used mummies as a kind of medicine. It was said that it could be taken internally to treat arthritis, applied externally to stop bleeding, and when ground into powder it was said to promote the use of men and women for intercourse, after which it became popular in Europe. Egyptian locals would sell the mummies at very low prices, so a large number of mummies began to be smuggled to Europe. The smuggling became more and more exaggerated after it was discovered that mummies could also be made into oil paints, and the number of mummies in Egypt kept decreasing and began to outstrip demand.

So what are the famous paintings that used mummy brown? The first and most famous one would be "Liberty Leading the People" by French painter Delacroix. This is a painting to commemorate the July Revolution in France in 1830. It is said that Delacroix used a large number of mummy browns to set the main tone of the picture, making it look solemn and solemn. It is just a bit ironic that the painting is meant to express the freedom of the people, but the bodies of the dead people are used for the painting, and the two are combined. In the Louvre in Paris, France, there is a painting called "In the Kitchen", which was painted in 1815 by the French painter Madan Derouin. It depicts the daily life of Parisian citizens at that time. In the painting, two French women are doing needlework, while a child is playing with a toy in a basket on the floor, which can be seen in the kitchen from the facilities inside the house. The sudden turning back of the two women seems to be framed by the camera. A calm and leisurely atmosphere of life is expressed, while the dark brown base color of the interior walls accentuates the blue sky and white clouds outside the window, giving the whole picture a stronger contrast. The living atmosphere of the kitchen comes to life. And we can see the cracks on the kitchen walls. Mandolin himself was a painter with a paranoid pursuit of tones, and the slightest difference in color would make him feel dissatisfied. It is precisely for this reason that he pursues mummy brown brings the effect of shadow and light rhyme, and in several of his works, we can feel his extreme pursuit of hue and light.

The paintings of European royal collections, not only require the use of mummy brown but also cannot use mummies made by civilians. A mummy of an Egyptian monarch more than 2,000 years old can only be used to decorate noble frescoes, so the mummies of some Egyptian pharaohs and royal nobles could not escape the end of theft and smuggling, so much so that almost all the pharaohs' tombs in the Egyptian Imperial Valley were stolen and exhausted. In the thousands of paintings in the Louvre's collection, brown is used in every work. In addition to showing the skin tones of the figures, and shadows, it can also show the rhythm of light. It is difficult to say exactly how many of these paintings use this mummy brown. It is conceivable that in the history of rampant mummy theft in the 16th-19th centuries, there would have been a large number of works using mummy brown, so much so that one scholar who visited the Louvre said that he could see the artistic ideas expressed in these paintings in addition to the smell of mummies and the trance of the ancient Egyptians painting their bodies as paintings.

Today it has long been forbidden to sell the pigment Mummy Brown, as it is essentially an outdated way of developing pigments. The pigment itself is not stable enough, but modern mummy brown uses a completely new formula, using bauxite made of hematite and quartz. This color is very similar to mummy brown, has the same properties, and also does not crack. Although there are alternatives, there are still people who seek the effect brought by this original mummy brown, and they use dried mummies bought on the black market to grind out the mummy brown by hand. Because making your paint has always been the sole secret of many painters.

Almost every ancient Egyptian was mummified after death. Some historians estimate that 400 million mummies, including animal mummies, were buried throughout Egypt, but it is not known how many were made into pigments, and the number must certainly have been staggering. These ancient Egyptians originally thought they could preserve their bodies permanently after death, but they did not expect the world they pursued after death to be on a canvas. What do you think about this?