56 PAINTING MATERIALS
with mummies in various Egyptian and Carthaginian sarcophagi are little altered
with respect to chemical or physical behavior. Oxidation, although it may play
some part in the formation of fossil resins, does not seem to be an important factor
in ultimate disintegration.
Resins, history in painting. Either as natural exudates from the tree or as
fossils mixed with an oil, resins have been used from very ancient times. Laurie
(Materials of the Painter's Craft> p. 27) examined a fragment of a coffin of the
XIX Egyptian dynasty, and found a reddish varnish which dissolved easily in
alcohol, leaving the gesso and the black painting beneath unaffected. It was too
transparent to have been a mixture with beeswax, and, as alcohol and petroleum
were unknown at the time of its application, it seems likely to have been a natural,
semi-liquid resin laid on while warm. A solution of resin in oil is said to have
been found in specimens taken from the temple of Jupiter Ammon. As the Egyp-
tians were unacquainted with linseed oil, the conclusion is that this was oil of
cedar which was used also for embalming. Mummy cases of the first millennium
B.C., examined by Tschirch (see Barry, p. i), revealed the use of mastic, storax,
and Aleppo resin; sandarac was found in Carthaginian varnishes of the same
period. According to Lucas (Antiques; Their Restoration and Preservation^ p. 56),
the black, varnish-like coating on many wooden funerary objects from ancient
Egypt, wrongly termed bitumen, pitch, or tar, is a black resin possibly such as is
found and used in India, China, and Japan today. It was applied directly to
the wood. It dissolves in alcohol and acetone, and, sprayed with these, it will
soften and re-adhere. Laurie thinks that the use of varnish in Egypt was limited
in time to the XIX and XX dynasties (1300 B.C.), being abandoned shortly
at ten Two embalming resins, used by the Incas of South America and examined
by Reutter (see Barry, p. i), appear to contain, among other things. Tola and
Peru balsam, Phoenician mummies show the use of amber.
In China, as early as the Chou dynasty (1169 to 255 B.C.), lacquer, a natural
resin from a living tree, was in use as a carriage varnish. Covers for jars, coated
with red lacquer and belonging to the Han dynasty (266 B.C. to 250 A.D.) have
been found. The art of applying and carving lacquer reached its height in China
technically in the Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644 A.D.), The Japanese learned the
husbandry of the lacquer tree and the use of the resin from the Chinese. The
earliest specimens of lacquer work in Japan are of the VI century, although it is
mentioned in records which date two centuries earlier. The process of working
lacquer was kept a carefully guarded secret, and it is only recently that investi-
gators have examined the constituents of lacquer and the methods by which it
was employed (see Lacquer).
^Sabin (p, 437) refers to Gulick and Timbs who, writing in 1859, w«re of the
opinion that varnishes composed of resins dissolved in oil must have been used
in Persia, India, and China before the height of Greek art, and they concluded
that the Greeks, also, must have been acquainted with the varnish process. It is