PIGMENTS 141
it was made principally in Germany. The Mayans in Central America used a
native earth blue in their paintings, a color that seems not to have been known
in any other place in the world.
The mineral pigments on the palette of the European painters of the XV and
XVI centuries differed little from those of the classical painters, with the possible
exception of the blue glass pigment, smalt, which came into use in Europe in
this period. Perhaps, also, some new vegetable colors were added about then.
Knowledge of the painting materials of this time begins to be handed down in
numerous treatises and manuscript writings. From this period there has come,
also, a wealth of objective evidence in the form of actual paintings. Examination
of these paintings and the identification of materials in them yields technical
information that is often more important than that to be had from literary
sources. During these centuries of the late Renaissance, many vegetable pig-
ments continued to be used, particularly for book illumination, and they included
coloring materials from safflower, brazil-wood, turnsole, and woad. Later sepia and
bistre came into use for water color work on paper.
During all these centuries the pigments employed for painting in the Far East
were similar to tfeose of the West. The Chinese had basically the same things to
start with as the Europeans. Vermilion was used in China as a pigment as early
as the Shang period (1766-1122 B.C.). It is not known when it came to be made
artificially, but it was probably the Chinese alchemists who first learned how to
make mercuric sulphide by the dry process. The minerals, malachite and azurite,
were important in Chinese painting and so were the plain earth colors. The lead
pigments, red and white, were.used in the T'ang period and perhaps much earlier.
Vegetable pigments like indigo, safflower, gamboge, were also known and used.
The ways in which pigments were employed differed from practices of the West
more than the pigments themselves.
The first years of the XVIII century mark the beginning of modern synthetic
pigments. It was in 1704 that Diesbach in Germany discovered how to make the
pigment that is still made in large quantities under the name, Prussian blue. It is
the first pigment about which there is fairly definite knowledge and written
contemporary record of the circumstances surrounding the discovery. From then
on, equally definite knowledge of the date of discovery of new pigments is avail-
able from published records in scientific journals. Unfortunately, often much
less is known about the approximate date of introduction of a new color as an
artists' material than about its date of discovery. The middle XVIII century was
not productive of new coloring materials, but in the last quarter, beginning with
the discovery of copper arsenite by Scheele (see Scheele's Green) in 1778, new
pigments began to appear in fairly rapid succession. These were the direct out-
come of the discovery of several new chemical elements about that time, prin-
cipally zinc, cobalt, and chromium. Cobalt green first appeared about 1780, zinc
oxide in 1782, and cobalt blue in 1802. In 1797 the French chemist, L. N. Vau-