70 PAINTING MATERIALS
rials is also in use. For specification this requires a second term, and the whole
would be, for example, ' glue tempera/ ' gum tempera/ or ' egg tempera.'
If glues and gums as well as egg are to be considered as tempera mediums, the
history of this general group would go along with the history of all painting until
the late Middle Ages. Then, although oil came to displace the aqueous materials
in some degree, it did not crowd them out of use altogether. Before the advent of
oil, wax was about the only other medium as such, and fresco gave a place to a
crystalline binder for purposes of wall painting. It can still be said, however, that
the greater part of pictorial painting, the world over, has been done with tempera
—with some kind of aqueous medium.
Recently, studies have shown results which indicate that the fresco method
was used in India as early as the XI or XII century A.D. (see S. Paramasivan,
' The Mural Paintings in the Brihadisvara Temple at Tanjore—An Investigation
into the Method/ Technical Studies, V [1937], pp. 221-240), but glue was the
general medium, it appears, for panel pictures and illuminations, and also for
painting on walls. In a treatise compiled by Somesvara of the XII century and
containing material corresponding to that of the VII century, a glue made from
buffalo skin is spoken of as * the adamantine medium * and is said to be * uni-
versally approved for painting ' (see Ananda K. Coomaraswamy,' The Technique
and Theory of Indian Painting/ Technical Studies, III [1934], pp. 60-61). Glue
has been the traditional medium also for the painting of China and Japan. Even
for walls, there seems little doubt that pigments were mixed into a thin size.
The nature of the size probably differed from place to place, and included any
of the animal tissues from which it can be made.
With the exception of the salmon egg medium of the Canadian West Coast
Indians (see Egg Tempera), there is little to suggest that egg was used much out-
side of Europe. Laurie (Materials of the Painter's Craft, pp. 20-21) considers it
quite probable that egg, both the white and the yolk, was used as a medium in
Egypt, but reports one analysis of paint from a tomb of the XIX dynasty in
which the medium was found to be gum. Lucas (Antiques: Their Restoration and
Preservation, p. 140) says that all Egyptian mural paintings are in tempera, but
does not distinguish the particular kind. In his Ancient Egyptian Materials (p.
149), he had already said that if egg white were ever used, it must have been at a
late period, because the domestic fowl was not indigenous but was an importation.
The complete disappearance of the easel painting and practically of the wall
painting of classical Greece has made the inquiry into the medium of that art
depend on a few isolated references by classical writers. Certainly it appears that
more than one tempera was familiar to them. Laurie (Materials of the Painter's
Craft, p. 67) makes the following translation of a passage in Pliny (XXXV, 26):
Painters put on s&ndyx as a ground colour; thereafter, laying on furpurissum with
egg, they produce the brilliance of vermilion. If they prefer to produce the brilliance