TOOLS AND EQUIPMENT 301

to have been at all usual, for other representations seem to indicate that Egyptian
painting was done with fluid paint carried in small pots. The same author draws
attention to a reference in the Mt Athos MS., a painter's handbook supposed to
reflect practices of the XI century and later, in which is mentioned a palette
with a hole for the thumb of the left hand. By the XV century (figure 16), paint-
ings of St Luke had begun to show him holding what is evidently a wooden palette.
The shapes of the palettes in these paintings are widely varied, usually oblong
however, and with thumb holes differently placed. The corners are apt to be cut
in complex curves. In an engraving from a self-portrait by Jacopo Bassano, there

FIGURE 15. Paint boxes: (#*) a box, evidently containing paints in small jars, shown in a
representation of a woman painter in a Pompeian wall painting (from Berger, I and II,
J75> % 32); W a bronze box with a sliding cover and hinged lattice lids under that,
containing irregular lumps of pigment and found in the tomb of a late classical Gallo-
Roman painter at St Medard-des-Pres (from Berger, I and II, 214, fig. 46); (c) a modern
sketch box for oil painting with a palette, metal hooks in the top for holding canvas or
academy board, and compartments below for brushes, tubes, and bottles.

is shown a paddle-shaped palette having three straight sides and a fourth extended
to form a handle. This shape seems to have continued, though it is rarely seen, for
it appears again in a palette formerly used by Sir Joshua Reynolds and now shown
as exhibit no. 332 m the Royal Academy, London, During the XVI century oval
palettes seem to have come more into use and are common in the XVII and after.
Perhaps a transitional shape is that seen (figure 17, b) in the drawing by Peter
Breughel the Elder, *A Painter in his Studio/ Bayonne, where an oval with one
straight side is seen. A similar palette, oval but cut off straight at the thumb hole,
is held by Gerard Dow in his self-portrait at the Cheltenham Municipal Art
Gallery,
Palette Cup (see Dipper).
Palette Knife. A spatula, usually smaller and slightly more flexible than the
kind used for domestic and laboratory purposes, serves to mix the oil paint in
modern practice (figure 23). When the paint is worked to the consistency required,
it can then be piled on the palette. As prepared for the artists' trade, palette knives