An unusual use of Egyptian blue in the Tarquin painting of the “Master of Bacchae”

Abstract

The ongoing research promoted by PACT on materials and techniques in Tarquinian painting has highlighted some aspects of the painting technique in the so-called Master of the Bacchae workshop, active between 510 and 480 BC at Tarquinia.

The spatial characterisation of the Egyptian blue in the group of tombs attributed to the workshop accessible today, carried out using the Visible-induced infrared luminescence (VIL) technique, led to important results that show a hitherto undocumented use of this pigment in Etruscan painting, both for the construction and modelling of figures.

The technical solutions highlighted show the workshop's awareness of the special illuminating properties of Egyptian blue in the creation of both volume and colour shading, contradicting the traditional view of a two-dimensional representation in painting before the 4th century BC based exclusively on outline and flat colour fields.

Alongside these, specific features have been revealed to emphasise the semantic value of the blue colour in the beard and hair of a few ‘special’ characters.