Encaustic
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The encaustic is an artistic Technique, when bound in wax color pigments hot be applied to the surface to be painted.
History and painting technique
The technique has a much longer tradition than that of oil painting. It experienced its heyday in the art of Greco-Roman antiquity. In the artist's imagination, their own materialized thoughts were etched into the painting surface with fire. The word encaustic has also been used for more than two and a half millennia and is derived from the Greek word enkauston , branded , which in turn comes from enkaio , branded .
While electrically heated painting implements are used today, in ancient Greece either cold colors were applied with hot spatulas, the cauteria heated over a glowing brazier , and then burned in using heat radiation (through glowing iron) or applied hot liquid to stone, wood or ivory. Melted beeswax with or without the addition of drying oil (nut oil) was used as wax . The color pigments were mostly imported from Egypt and Sudan .
The encaustic technique was a very elaborate technique for the artists of the time, but it was precisely this technique that enabled ancient Greek painting to flourish . In late antiquity it was replaced by other painting techniques and fell into oblivion around the 6th century AD. The famous Egyptian mummy portraits , which still show a unique luminosity and freshness, have been preserved. A few very old Christian icons in encaustic technology have also been preserved, for example in the Monastery of St. Catherine on Sinai or the Maria Advocata in Rome ; however, most of the icons painted in encaustic style fell victim to the picture dispute. In later times egg tempera was used instead of encaustic for icons . The famous Egyptian mummy portraits in the British Museum in London and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo , wall paintings in Pompeii and in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich are excellent examples of encaustic . Traces of encaustic has even been discovered on Trajan's Column in Rome.
Only the renewed interest of the early modern age in ancient art and ancient cultures aroused the attention of artists and researchers for this long-forgotten painting technique. Since the oil paintings of the old masters inevitably threatened to get lost through darkening and shrinkage cracks, one was downright fascinated by the longevity of the encaustic paintings. Numerous researchers tried to uncover the secret of the wax technique from the few surviving literary sources. Violent differences of opinion arose over the legendary Punic wax, which, however, does not necessarily have to have been the binding agent of ancient encaustic. According to an old recipe, the wax is said to have been boiled in sea water and then exposed to the action of the sun and moon. By boiling the beeswax in salt water, the wax is freed from almost all of the impurities contained in natural beeswax, which makes it harder but also more brittle. This removal of non-waxy components causes the wax to be bleached. In 1845 a handbook on encaustic by Franz Xaver Fernbach was published in Munich .
Modern representatives
In the 20th century, artists such as Jasper Johns , Fernando Leal Audirac , Christine Hahn , Robert Geveke , Martin Assig , Hilde Stock-Sylvester and Norimichi Akagi created important works with the technique of encaustic.
literature
- Franz Xaver Fernbach : The encaustic painting. A teaching and manual for artists and art lovers . Verlag der Literarisch-Artistische Anstalt, Munich 1845 ( digitized ; digitized ).
- C. Heinrich Wunderlich: Encaustic painting techniques. An attempt to reconstruct from sources. In: Restauro 2/2000, pp. 110-115.
- Birgit Hüttemann-Holz: Wanderlust - poems and painting in encaustic - poems and encaustic paintings. San Francisco 2013
- Marlis Albrecht: People grow. Hackenberg, Horb am Neckar 2012, ISBN 978-3-937280-28-8
