The extravagant, brilliant red envelops an entire room in the luxurious villa outside Pompeii.
The Romans used various pigments to make red, but all were relatively dull except for one; costly Cinnabar. The luxury substance mined in Spain at high monetary and human cost, is the principal ore of mercury – a toxic, even deadly, material. Transported to Rome and then purified and ground to a precise grade of fineness to produce pigment, Cinnabar was used to decorate the homes of the world’s most wealthiest patrons.
The first century A.D. Roman architect engineer Vitruvius described a process of applying and polishing up to seven layers of plaster to create the proper bedding for a painting or fresco.
The lower layers comprised of increasingly finer sand mortar, with layers closer to the finish surface mixed with alabaster or marble dust. Colour was applied to the finished walls as frescoes, a complicated, exacting technique in which paint fuses with still wet plaster. Lime in the plaster reacts with the paint and the materials chemically fuse once dry. The durable but chalky looking surface is then burnished to a mirror like luster, a key characteristic in color perception.
Vitruvius describes the brushing on of wax that had been mixed with warmed oil. The wall surface was then rubbed down with a wax candle and clean linen cloths to create the exquisite polish. He warned that unless it was protected by this wax finish, the special Cinnabar red would discolor when exposed to sunlight or moonlight.
The brilliant color was favored by Ancient Romans, who used it extensively in decoration. Examples can still be seen in the wall art of Pompeii. In fact, cinnabar was so prized in Roman times that it cost more than Egyptian blue and red ocher from Africa. From the 12th century, cinnabar was also used extensively in carved Chinese lacquer ware. In ancient times, vermilion pigments were made from cinnabar.
CHROMAPHILIA the story of color in art by Stella Paul p. 19
Learn more about cinnabar at wiki.
Tidbit: Marcus Vitruvius Pollio ( 80–70 BC – after c. 15 BC), commonly known as Vitruvius, was a Roman author, architect, civil engineer, and military engineer during the 1st century BC, known for his multi-volume work entitled De architectura. His discussion of perfect proportion in architecture and the human body led to the famous Renaissance drawing by Leonardo da Vinci of Vitruvian Man.
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