Where did the Romans get their paint colors from?

Answer 1

The Romans adopted the pigments used by the Greeks who, in turn adopted them from the Egyptians. The Romans also used vermillion, a brilliant red or scarlet pigment made from powdered cinnabar, a common ore of Mercury. The oldest known use of vermillion has been found in a village in Turkey. It was also used in China in 5000-4000 BC. Cinnabar was mined in Spain beginning in about 5300 BC. The Romans got cinnabar from the Almaden mine in northwest Spain. It was mined by convicts because since mercury is highly toxic, working there was like a death sentence. Vermilion was a very expensive dye.

The Egyptians pioneered the development of pigments and dyes. Manufacturing started around 4000 BC. They introduced the washing of pigments to increase pigments' strength and purity. They also produced new materials, the most famous of which was Egyptian blue-first made around 3000 BC.

The main dies were iron oxide pigments; natural earth pigments containing hydrated iron oxide: red ochre and yellow ochre (ochre 's colour ranges from yellow to deep orange or brown) and umber, whose colours range from yellowish to reddish to grays and is darker than the other similar earth pigments.

Minerals were also used. Orpiment, a deep orange-yellow arsenic sulfide mineral, was used to make a bright yellow pigment. Red was made from realgar, an arsenic sulfide mineral, also known as "ruby sulphur" or "ruby of arsenic," Malachite (the name is derived for the Greek for "mallow-green stone") was used for green. A deep blue was made from azurite, a soft copper mineral

The Egyptians also developed dyes from vegetable sources. They were the first to fix dyes onto a transparent white powder base to produce pigments called lake pigments. Solutions of organic dyes extracted from parts of plants were mixed with hydrated clay or tannin to form an insoluble pigment. Many lake pigments are called fugitive because the dyes involved are unstable when exposed to light. The roots of madder, a plant from the genus rubia, was the source of madder lake (sometimes also called rose madder) a dull violet red pigment in tints and medium solutions, darkening to an impermanent, dull magenta red in mass tone (a hue which is created when a pigment is applied on top on another one and you do not see the colour underneath, but the two together produced the hue). Indigo lake (indigo is a deep and bright colour which is between blue and violet) was made from the leaves of woad (a plant native to eastern Siberia and Western Asia) was also used by the Egyptians.

The Phoenicians had the monopoly of the production and trade of a deep purple dye called Tyrian purple or imperial purple. It was made in the city of Tyre from the spiny dye-murex, a sea shell. Making the dye was expensive and very time consuming. Thousands of shells were needed and they had to be caught and cracked. The snail had to be removed and soaked. Juice was extracted from a tiny glad and placed in the sun. The juice then turned white, then yellow-green and then red. This turned progressively got darker. The process was stopped when it reached a hue between crimson and violet.