In a final and vital stage, paint spilling over the outline was overpainted with opaque white. As the last step, the final outline and details were drawn, mainly with red ochre. Afterward, colour came, commonly with pigment mixtures and layered applications. This was followed by the application of white or coloured backgrounds, at times leaving a reserve for pictorial details. It is assumed that the work started with a preliminary sketch drawn in red ochre on the plastered and smoothed wall, following general guidelines or even modular grids drawn on the wall surface. This consistency mainly derives from aesthetic choices but also from an organized and regulated workflow that has been theoretically reconstructed by different authors, offering valuable insights into pigment use and painting techniques. Its highly formalized painting style is easily recognized. The Pharaonic Civilization offers the most extended cultural continuity of the ancient world. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript”.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting information files.įunding: “PW: DIM Analytics, project IMAPAT, Ile-de-France, PW: ANR-11-IDEX-0004-02, National Research Agency under the program Future Investments (program POLYRE of Sorbonne Universités), CD and DS: Prf-2019-060, The Belgian Federal Science Policy Office through the FED-tWIN program. Received: OctoAccepted: JPublished: July 12, 2023Ĭopyright: © 2023 Martinez et al. (2023) Hidden mysteries in ancient Egyptian paintings from the Theban Necropolis observed by in-situ XRF mapping. At this stage, though the progress in this on-site material assessment of ancient works of art definitely means astonishing progress, one humbly has to face the fact that these ancient treasures shall still retain part of their defining mysteries.Ĭitation: Martinez P, Alfeld M, Defeyt C, Elleithy H, Glanville H, Hartwig M, et al. However, this also leads to a more complex description of pigment mixtures that could have multiple meanings, where the practical often leads towards the symbolic, and from there hopefully to a renewed definition of the use of colours in complex sets of ancient Egyptian representations. In both cases, the precise and readable imaging of the physical composition of the painted surface offers a renewed visual approach based of chemistry, that can be shared through a multi- and interdisciplinary approach. The use of XRF mapping has, for instance, been applied to a known case of correction by surface repaint, something that is supposedly rare in the ancient Egyptian formal artistic process, while another fully unexpected one was discovered during the analytic exploration of a royal representation. Our interdisciplinary project has decided to experiment on-site with state-of-the-art portable analysis tools, avoiding any physical sampling, to see if our knowledge of the work of the ancient Egyptian painters and draughtsmen could be taken at a further stage, while based on physical quantification that could be seen as a stronger and more reliable foundation for a redefined scientific hypothesis. A lot of this modern and theoretical reconstruction is, however, based on the usual archaeological guessing game that aims at filling the remaining blanks. The artistic process has been also reconstructed, mainly from the information presented by unfinished monuments, showing surfaces at different stages of completion. However, most of these studies took place in museums while the painted surfaces, preserved in funerary chapels and temples, remained somewhat estranged from this primary physical understanding. The limited palette for example has been analysed from actual painted surfaces but also from pigments and painting tools retrieved on site. By the 1930s, a lot had already been sampled and described. The material study of ancient Egyptian paintings began with the advent of Egyptology during the 19th century.
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