Ancient artist pigments found in Pompeii

I was watching a video about recent excavations at Pompeii, and it mentioned there was a "House of Painters" that was found complete with all sorts of artist supplies, like pigments, paint pots, compasses (the kind for drawing circles), squares,  plum bobs, and more.



The pictures of the ancient pigments we super interesting to me, and I had to find out more!

I found this website Pompeii in Color that details the different materials, methods, and pigments. I was a bit frustrated by how they kept scrolling through the images of the pigments, so I'm pasting all the images + captions here so I can see them!

Small cup with dark red pigment, 1st century CE, red ocher, Pompeii, National Archaeological Museum of Naples: MANN 117356.

Small cup with red pigment, 1st century CE, red ocher, Pompeii, National Archaeological Museum of Naples: MANN 112251

Small cup with yellow pigment, 1st century CE, yellow ocher, Pompeii, National Archaeological Museum of Naples: MANN 112257.

Small cup with purple pigment, 1st century CE, murex, Pompeii, National Archaeological Museum of Naples: MANN 117365.

Small cup with pink pigment, 1st century CE, rose madder, Pompeii, National Archaeological Museum of Naples: MANN 117323.

I had not known they were using murex for pigment! I'd always kind of wondered if people were able to paint the shade of purple that they wore. It looks like they could!

I feel like there should be more than this, especially pigments like lead red (minimum), malachite, and cinnabar. I'm wondering if they just didn't put all the pigments on the museum site, and how I might track them down....

I found this image on reddit:

I see greens! And, is that dark blue lapis? I wish there were more info!

I found the original study in the Journal of Archeological Sciences, Pompeian pigments. A glimpse into ancient Roman colouring materials, but it don't have access to it. I wonder if my public library does?

In the meantime, I found the study linked here, in the Freie Universität Berlin Repository


The green is malachite. And the light red/pink color isn't just madder in this pot, it's madder + red lead + calcium + hematite and sometimes other stuff.

They also, for some reason, seem to have mislabled the blues as "pink." The Cuprorivaite is Egyptian Blue (made by heating copper and silica/quartz in a kiln to make blue).

The aragonite seems to be a pinkish form of calcium carbonate--I'm not sure why they were adding it to the Egyptian blue, or why they added orpiment (yellow) and Egyptian blue to one of the pink colors. Maybe they were making large batches of particular shades?

Here's an article about Roman Grey

One of the most remarkable findings of the research was the identification of Pompeian Gray, a previously unknown color in the Roman world. This particular shade is distinguished by the presence of barite and alunite, providing the first evidence of the use of barium sulfate in ancient Mediterranean mural painting.

The mixture of these minerals gave the pigment a grayish tone with a singular chromatic depth, possibly used to enhance realism and volume in pictorial compositions.

Purple's my favorite color, so I was really interested by the study's section about purple:

The pot ref. 9521, found in the House with Workshop, keeps a small
violet block (L* = 67.17; a* = 4.00; b* = 7.48) that appears as a cohesive
mixture of dark red (ca. 46 %), white (ca. 44 %), yellow (ca. 9 %) and
rare blue grains(ca. 1 %) (Fig. 4d). Chemical composition of this mixture
is featured by predominant Fe, moderate amounts of Cu, Ca, and Si, with
lower Pb and K and traces of As (Table S1). FORS highlighted that the
predominant iron is due to the red ochre, as the reflectance curve
(Fig. S4) shows the band at ~580 nm, typical of this type of pigment.
FTIR supported FORS data, revealing the bands of red ochre at 3360,
1626, 1038, 779, 695, 574, 434 cm− 1 (Fig. 4c). Moreover, peaks of
calcite (1417, 873, 712 cm− 1) and aragonite (1447, 855 cm− 1) were also
observed (Table S1). Thus, the colour was obtained by mixing inorganic
pigments: the main component is the red ochre (rubrica), added to
carbonate-bearing substrate (creta). However, microscopic observations
and the presence of Pb, Cu and traces of As revealed a more complex
recipe, obtained by adding red lead (cerussa usta), Egyptian blue
(caeruleum, see below) and traces of orpiment (auripigmentum) as tone
correctors (Table 2).
from a complex mixture of inorganic compounds at Pompeii, since all
pigments with a violet shade so far investigated were obtained by using
the purpurissum (Augusti, 1967; Cottica and Mazzocchin, 2009; Giachi
et al., 2009; Marcaida et al., 2016). Only occasionally, the addition of
Egyptian blue was observed to obtain the desired tonality (Marcaida
et al., 2016).

I'd never heard the word "purpurissum" before, so I did a quick search and found [Pompeii Purpurissum Pigment Problems]

The powder comes from some lumps of unused pink-purple pigment that were excavated at Pompeii. Pliny described a purple pigment ‘purpurissum’ that was made by dyeing a colourless earth substrate with shellfish purple

I was wondering how they turned shellfish purple into a pigment! Reading the study, it looks like they might have dyed kaolin clay with murex to make a pigment. Fascinating!

From the latter article:

The detection of Br by elemental analysis such as EELS or EDX is
complicated by the presence of Al. There are problems is using historical texts such as Pliny. What did he mean by ‘hysginum’ or ‘creta argentaria’? ‘Creta’ literally means chalk, but many white earths such as kaolinite-rich clays (or diatomite) are indistinguishable from pure white chalk to the naked eye, and so any of these could have been called “creta” by the Romans. It was also unclear what Pliny meant by dyeing “with” purple textiles.
A possible explanation for inconsistent results is inhomogeneity: if the material is an extremely diluted form of shellfish purple, it might well be inhomogeneous to such an extent that the tiny amount of sample investigated by TEM did not contain any Br, whereas that examined by DE-MS did. 44 Another explanation is that lumps may be of different origin. Some, however, e.g. 18107 and 18129, are very similar. Alternatively, an amount of debromination may have taken place with ageing, so that only the diluents (madder, indigo) remain in some samples. Alternatively, maybe some are more ‘adulterated’ by plant dye than others

It seems like very little murex might have been used, with much of the color being attained by indigo and madder because the murex was so expensive.

The bit about "It was also unclear what Pliny meant by dyeing “with” purple textiles," made me remember how some pigments were transported during the medieval ages. I recall reading somewhere that (blue? blue from indigo?) would be dyed onto cloth and then that was transported. Then the medieval scribes would grind up the cloth and use that as pigment. For the life of me, though, I can't find the reference. I wonder, if, maybe, the Romans were doing something similar with murex?

Bwahahaha! I found the blue pigment that was dyed fabric! It was called folium:



It looks like it wasn't ground up, but rather that's how it was transported (Solving the 1000 year mystery of rare blue medieval paint):

They looked to medieval sources that credited the plant, Chrozophora tinctoria, as a natural source of color that created blue and purple dyes. They were stored on cloth and dried as watercolors. When it was time to use them as paint, a piece of cloth was cut and the paint was extracted with water or another element to bind it to the page.

This is TRULY fascinating, to me! I've always wondered about how pigments were discovered, created, managed, and used, in that time frame. I love the idea of using cloth to store watercolor paint!

Hello and welcome back from the 'rabbit hole' of research!  This whole subject is fascinating.  I would suggest that the blue pigment is "Egyptian Blue"  and when I went looking found that is still for sale...
It was the first "synthetic" pigment - it had to be made from it's different components.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/scientists-recreate-egyptian-blue-pigment-2653299

The chemical analysis of it in the study seems to indicate that as well. It says it's made of "Cuprorivaite, quartz, and calcium carbonate," and Cuprorivaite seems to translate to Egyptian Blue. The same ingredients of copper, quartz sand, and calcium are used in the below video on how Egyptian Blue is made.



A similar pigment, Han Purple, was a apparently made in a similar manner, but with the addition of Barium. (Asian Art Museum article on Han Purple)

Han Purple and Han Blue

The Lavender is Han Purple

Some more interesting videos on Egyptian Blue and Han Purple, with some of their scientific applications:

Jill Dyer wrote:Hello and welcome back from the 'rabbit hole' of research!  This whole subject is fascinating.

I went down that rabbit hole HARD. I was totally going to get to bed on time, until I saw those paint pots. I've been enjoying learning about ancient pigments for a few years now. It's like a combination of two of my great loves: art and history!

Historical material culture (the stuff people use in everyday life) is a principal interest and the how on earth did they accomplish THAT!  Mostly it has been focused on textiles,  but of course that leads to other things.   Most intriguing is the co-incidental techniques in different parts of the world with no apparent connections.   (?Where did the day just go?)

Thanks for posting all of this Nicole!

Jill Dyer wrote:Historical material culture (the stuff people use in everyday life) is a principal interest and the how on earth did they accomplish THAT!  ...   (?Where did the day just go?)

Yes, and yes!  Also, (jokingly) purple is objectively the best range of colours ( from blue to red & white to black)!

Thank you for sharing!

Thank you for this fascinating post!
The article you reference now shows as open access, so perhaps you can get hold of it now:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440325000500

Then there's this...

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ffadjQW67Tg