Leonardo da Vinci also used tempera paint on his Madonna and Child (c. The painting was done on canvas and now hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. 1484-1486), the iconic depiction of Venus rising from a seashell. One of the most famous egg tempera paintings is Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c. Throughout the Byzantine Empire, tempera paint was used on wooden panels to create beautiful Byzantine icons and altarpieces, as well as illuminated vellum manuscripts. The great thing about tempera paint is that it can very easily be washed off of most surfaces with water.Įgg tempera paint was first used to paint and decorate Christian catacombs in Italy, and shortly afterward the paint was adopted by the Egyptians to paint papyrus rolls and mummy cases. Some artists used only the yolk of the egg, while others used it all. The egg acted as the binding agent and bound all the ingredients together. The pigment was gleaned from natural items such as dirt, sticks, stones, and bones. Initially, it was called egg tempera because it was made up of egg yolk, distilled water, linseed oil, and powdered pigment. It was first developed by Giotto and Duccio di Buoninsegna in Italy and later used by Botticelli and Da Vinci as well. The use of tempera paint dates back to the Byzantine era of the 13th and 14th centuries.
TEMPERA ON VELLUM HOW TO
Its texts were written on vellum (animal skin), not paper. An illuminated manuscript is a book that was written and decorated by hand sometime between the fall of Rome, in the late 5th century AD, and the perfection of printing technology towards the end of the 15th century. The history of manuscript illumination corresponds almost exactly with the epoch we know as the Middle Ages, a vast period of about a thousand years. The illuminated manuscript is undoubtedly the most tactile and recognizable of all such collectibles from this era. Their appeal is both intimate and timeless.
Its history spans at least a millennium, and for many of us today these handwritten, richly embellished works of art represent the quintessential form of medieval artistic expression. The history of the book forms one of the chief categories of the material culture of medieval and Renaissance Europe.