The History of Oil Paint

Oil painting goes way back to old Greek, Egyptian, and Roman civilizations. They used techniques like encaustic: a technique using hot wax colors, mineral pigments, and tempera: which is a technique using dry color mixed with a glutinous substance (often egg yolks) and water. In Italy and Greece (around the Renaissance era), olive oil was often used to prepare pigment mixtures but the olive oil made the paintings take a long time to dry. often oils were used as a kind of varnish, at the finishing of the paintings.

Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) said that the technique of oil painting was reinvented in Europe in the early 1400's by a man named Jan Van Eyck (1390-1441). oil painting since then have had minor changes, but the changes are not totally different from the techniques of that time. Van Eyke's major achievement was the making of a varnish based on a siccative oil, which was mainly linseed oil. This varnish consisted of piled glass, calcined bones, and linseed oil that were kept at a boiling temperature for a long time. this method proved to be a which drying varnish as opposed to the slower ones like walnut oil and poppy seed oil. Antonello Da Messina (1430-1479) also made an improvement to oil painting. Antonello added lead oxide (litharge) in the mixtures to help improve with the drying.

Oil paint has had a huge history, and is still a popular medium in the art world today. Oil paint has been used for centuries, and many discoveries have been made in the process of developing oil paint. It is important to understand where oil paint originates, because often people do not realize how far back in history oil paint goes. It is important to understand the process it took to get to what oil paint is today; oil paint was used to create art, but it was a science to create it.