ANCIENT USE OF VERMILION.
Native cinnabar, or vermilion, a sulphuret of mercury, was first prepared by Kallias, the Athenian, five hundred years before the Christian era. There was a minium or cinnabar wrought in Spain from stone mixed with silver sand ; also in Colchis, where they disengaged it from the front of the high cliffs by shooting arrows at them. Pliny and Vitruvius called it minium, and Dioscorides observes that it was falsely thought by some to be the same as minium. Vermilion is the colour with which the statues of the gods were painted. It was abundant In Cara mania, also in Ethiopia, and was held in honour among the Romans. Their horses rode in triumph with their bodies painted with vermilion, and the faces of the statues of Jupiter
were coloured with this pigment on festal days. The monochrome pictures of the ancients were wrought with it. There was also an artificial kind of cinnabar, a shining scarlet sand, from above Ephesus. Vitruvius and Pliny say that vermilion was injured by the light of the sun and moon. To prevent this result, the colour was varnished by a mixture of wax and oil. Sir Humphrey Davy found vermilion in the baths of Titus.
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Bibliographic details
Tuapeka Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 1217, 27 January 1886, Page 5
Word Count
205ANCIENT USE OF VERMILION. Tuapeka Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 1217, 27 January 1886, Page 5
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