In the late-twentieth century, longstanding concerns about toxicity finally caused lead pigment to fall from favour. But before that, it was Europe’s white paint of choice for well over two thousand years. Lead’s poisonous nature had always posed serious problems, but it became deadly when paint-making was industrialised. Outsourcing its manufacture involved scaling-up processes that exposed unskilled workers to lead in its dangerous powdered form.
The purest and most noble color on the palette had surprisingly putrid origins. Traditionally, lead white was made by placing a coil of the metal under a heap of manure, digging it up after a month, and scraping off the coating of white crystal salt. Variations on the recipe included sprinkling the metal with vinegar and urine. Up to the seventeenth century, most apprentice painters started by making pigments, so they were familiar with such procedures, and respected their materials.
The Renaissance painter Titian – whose handprints in lead white oil paint are evident in X-rays of his canvases – showed no signs of lead poisoning, actively running a highly successful studio into his late-eighties, when he was cut down by the plague. (insert Titian images here) Titian knew his pigments and where they came from; his father was manager of a mine near Venice that produced the ore, galena, that was the source of lead. So Titian would have known how a friable, shiny bright ore was turned into a malleable, dull dark metal, and how that metal could be transformed again back into a friable, shiny bright pigment. He would have known, too, about theories of alchemical transformation – opposites engendering opposites – that might explain why white pigment’s immediate origins were black.
In Titian’s day, most galena was mined not for its lead content, but for its hidden silver; the dark metal was actually a by-product. And, like lead, silver also exhibited alternate states of being bright and shiny, then dark and dull. But in silver’s case, the changes were reversible –the familiar cycle of polishing and tarnishing – whilst lead’s changes were permanent. The ancient Greek philosopher, Theophrastus, described the white pigment as the terminal ‘rust’ of lead metal.
Contemporary understanding of such transformations connected the metals to the planets. Silver was a terrestrial reflection of the Moon, while lead reflected Saturn. Titian – and his clients – knew these symbolic connections, so he could even allude to them in his paintings. For example, in his Diana and Acteon, he depicted the goddess of the Moon, nature, and the hunt, accompanied by an African handmaiden. The two figures’ embrace is so intimate that they almost make one composite, a visual reference to the Moon which, of course, also cycles through light-and-dark phases.
Titian identified Diana with a (polished) silver crescent Moon diadem, painted in lead white. The pigments used for the African handmaiden’s skin appear transparent under X-rays, while the pigment for Diana’s skin – mainly lead white again – is opaque. An X-ray of the painting shows that the African handmaiden had originally been painted as a Caucasian, like all the other figures; to the best of my knowledge, there are no other such pentimenti in Titian’s work. Changing her ethnicity appears to have been a cosmological after-thought, a way of reinforcing Diana’s lunar connections. It is also possible that the joint alabaster-and-bronze coloring was inspired by classical statues representing the Moon in two of its other mythological guises, the goddesses Artemis and Selene.
Lead was also associated with Saturn through the contemporary alchemical connection between the seven metals and planets. (Silver was associated with the moon, mercury with its namesake planet, copper with Venus, gold with the Sun, iron with Mars, tin with Jupiter, and lead with Saturn.) So, lead white was associated with the planet furthest from the Sun, cold, slow-moving, and associated with melancholy. (insert Melancholy frontispiece here) It was believed that the pigment could not only influence their general health but also their state of mind. Those painters who did not make the pigment from scratch bought it from apothecaries, where it was also sold for medicinal purposes.
One painting in which these melancholic associations were harnessed is a portrait of John Donne, who, rather theatrically, directed his anonymous painter to create a picture exuding love-sickness. (insert John Donne image here) In his poems, some of which were alchemically informed, Donne had written at length about melancholic souls. In the portrait, a wisp emerges from his heart, extending towards his departed lover: a Saturnine soul painted with the Saturnine pigment, lead white.
