


It is used for stage scenery and full-size preparatory cartoons for murals and tapestries. Individual painters have experimented with other recipes, but few of those have proved successful all but William Blake’s later tempera paintings on copper sheets, for instance, have darkened and decayed, and it is thought that he mixed his pigment with carpenter’s glue.ĭistemper is a crude form of tempera made by mixing dry pigment into a paste with water, which is thinned with heated glue in working or by adding pigment to whiting (a mixture of fine-ground chalk and size). Other emulsions-such as casein glue with linseed oil, egg yolk with gum and linseed oil, and egg white with linseed or poppy oil-have also been used.

True tempera is made by mixture with the yolk of fresh eggs, although manuscript illuminators often used egg white and some easel painters added the whole egg. The ancient medium was in constant use in most world cultures. It was employed on a variety of supports, from the stone stelae (or commemorative pillars), mummy cases, and papyrus rolls of ancient Egypt to the wood panels of Byzantine icons and altarpieces and the vellum leaves of medieval illuminated manuscripts.Ī tempera medium is dry pigment tempered with an emulsion and thinned with water. Tempera was the original mural medium in the ancient dynasties of Egypt, Babylonia, Mycenaean Greece, and China and was used to decorate the early Christian catacombs. Tempera is an ancient medium, having been in constant use in most of the world’s cultures until it was gradually superseded by oil paints in Europe, during the Renaissance. Eventually, after the rise of oil painting, the word gained its present meaning. Such painting was distinguished from fresco painting, the colours for which contained no binder. The word tempera originally came from the verb temper, “to bring to a desired consistency.” Dry pigments are made usable by “tempering” them with a binding and adhesive vehicle. Tempera painting, painting executed with pigment ground in a water-miscible medium.

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