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Free Goodies: Vizier Amenemope's palette


aenimanu

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Hi everyone!
I bring you something I found in an article. It was very interesting and decided to make a palette out of it and share it with all of you.
This amazing 3400 year old paint box once belonged to Vizier Amenemope who lived during the reign of Amenhotep ll, c. 1427–1401 BCE. With a measure of 3.6x2.2x21 cm, It has an inscription inlaid in Egyptian blue.

(Extracted from this article)

This particular vizier, Amenemope, liked to paint for fun when he wasn’t advising the Pharaoh. The paint box, carved from a single piece of boxwood, shows inlay of Egyptian blue in incised hieroglyphics at each end. The rounded squares were carved into the surface to create the paint wells. From the far left the dry pigment cakes are:

  • finely ground carbon black
  • course ground carbon black
  • green (mixture of Egyptian blue frit, yellow ochre and orpiment)
  • Egyptian blue frit
  • Red (red ochre/red iron oxide mixed with orpiment).

The box is in surprisingly good condition and shows only minor cracking along the edges. Surfaces of the paint cakes look slightly dirty which would indicate the smearing of one pigment over another. Not bad for a three thousand four hundred year old artist’s paint box.

Anyway, I took some effort to get the palette and translate it to #hex so we can also make compositions out of it.
Here you can download my compilation of it and make your own compositions.
Hope you find it as interesting and useful I do.
Cheers!

Vizier Amenemope's Paint Box.afpalette


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@aenimanu  Fascinating story!  Thank you so much.


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Thank you.

I find it interesting that although yellow ochre is mentioned in relation to the components of the green, that there is no paint well for yellow ochre as a colour as such.

I wonder if this is bevause it would not show up on the backgrounds avalable.

Rather like how with present day CMYK printing there is no white ink. If one wants white one does not use any ink in that place, one relies on the colour of the paper to include white in the image.

So if someone tries to produce art using this palette, would it be best to use a pale yellow background?

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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3 hours ago, William Overington said:

Thank you.

I find it interesting that although yellow ochre is mentioned in relation to the components of the green, that there is no paint well for yellow ochre as a colour as such.

I wonder if this is bevause it would not show up on the backgrounds avalable.

Rather like how with present day CMYK printing there is no white ink. If one wants white one does not use any ink in that place, one relies on the colour of the paper to include white in the image.

So if someone tries to produce art using this palette, would it be best to use a pale yellow background?

William

 

Having done a little research it does seem that yellow was a standard colour used in Egyptian painting. Orpiment (a much brighter yellow than yellow ochre) is also not in this palette, so I would think that, much like many modern palettes, the vizier's palette simply contained a limited selection of colours that he wished to use, rather than being a comprehensive collection of all the colours which were available at the time.  

EDIT: Having done a little more research, it seems that the "standard" Egyptian palette consisted of six colours, red, blue, green, yellow, white and black. Although there were different shades used of the various colours.

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11 minutes ago, William Overington said:

@PaulEC Thank you.

So perhaps the palette was used for inscriptions rather than art?

William

 

That's possible, but I would think that, as pigments have always been expensive, it was simply a case of choosing the ones he wanted to use at the time. It would be very unusual for an artist to have a (physical) palette with every available colour! It does seem to me a little odd to have two quite similar shades of black in such a limited palette. Possibly this was just one of several different palettes he used.

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Yes, though using the background as a foreground colour can be awkward if, say, trying to paint white flowers on a tree as one would need to sort of go round the edge with another colour..

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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3 hours ago, William Overington said:

So if someone tries to produce art using this palette, would it be best to use a pale yellow background?

Usually it was hard to get a bright white background at the time, considering papyrus, wood or stone were the common canvas at the time. Even centuries later, when paper became more usual in the east, it wasn't completely white as we use today (normally some chemicals are used to bleach paper). So, a yellow backgroud would just make blue and green "greener" because of the orpiment and ocre, I guess.
 

3 hours ago, William Overington said:

@PaulEC Thank you.

So perhaps the palette was used for inscriptions rather than art?

William

 

Maybe both. I searched for this vizier's art in internet (the palette is actually in the Cleveland Museum of Art, so it makes sense that the museum itself keeps some of this man's art) but I found nothing. Maybe he was just as curious as we are and painting was just a hobby apart from his counseling work, so the palette is just adapted to his preferences.

 

3 hours ago, PaulEC said:

That's possible, but I would think that, as pigments have always been expensive, it was simply a case of choosing the ones he wanted to use at the time. It would be very unusual for an artist to have a (physical) palette with every available colour! It does seem to me a little odd to have two quite similar shades of black in such a limited palette. Possibly this was just one of several different palettes he used.

Yes. Indeed pigments were incredibly expensive back in the time. Not only because the rarity of some minerals, but also for the difficulties to ground some minerals with copper or bronze tools (iron casting technics start spreading centuries later). For example one of this astonishingly expensive pigments was the lapislazuli blue, which was quite more expensive than gold at the time. Anyway, orpiment is a very soft ore (1,5-2 of hardness, almost like talcum) so my guess is that orpiment was a rare ore imported from other places, which the vizier, as a remarcable person in the pharaoh's court, could afford. Mixing it with other yellow pigmens and ocres would just dilute the percentage of pigment so it lasts longer. That's just my guess.
 

 

3 hours ago, PaulEC said:

It does seem to me a little odd to have two quite similar shades of black in such a limited palette. Possibly this was just one of several different palettes he used.

Yes, I think you're possibly right. Most of painters and artists owns different palettes for different purposes. My guess on this is that he used black in a regular basis so this colour was the color that used to run out first. In the palette I configured, I used 2 different shades of black. The first is a carbon black, not completely black. but the second black is what we know in the printing industry as "rich black", which means that in the CMYK the colour used is not only the black ink (C=0 Y=0 M=0 K=100), but also the other inks are added tho the black base to enrich and enblack the black tone. I like to add just a 33% of CMY (C=33 Y=33 M=33 K=100), instead of the widely used 50%. Obviously, it is used in certain parts of a printing because it wastes larger amounts of ink, but the visual impact is bigger.
 

 

3 hours ago, iconoclast said:

I suggest that he didn't use yellow because ochre was the color of the painting ground (so to say the canvas). Like you use white in watercolors only in case of emergency as opaque white. Normally the white comes from the paper.

Yes, you're right indeed, saving pigments instead of wasting them was necessary because the price of the pigments. I'm pretty sure that the good vizier actually had another palette containing a white lime white tone, probably composed of Calcium hydroxide, and Calcium carbonate, also widely used since ancient times.

 

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I decided to try to produce an image using this palette using Affinity Designer.

I have been looking through the help facility and I cannot find out how to load the palette.

How to import a palette might be in there somewhere, but I have not found it.

I have loaded a palette previously, but that was some time ago and I don't remember how to do it.

Can someone explain please?

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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