![]() ![]() While not all of these famous works have been chemically analyzed, verdigris can reportedly be seen in paintings by the likes of Botticelli, Bosch, Bellini, and El Greco. ![]() This was mixed with binding agents, like egg white or linseed oil, and applied to canvas, paper, or wood. In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, artists commonly manufactured verdigris by hanging copper plates over boiling vinegar and collecting the crust that formed on the metal. Image from Jacob Christian Schäffer’s Entwurf einer allgemeinen Farbenverein, 1769įor many hundreds of years, verdigris was the most brilliant green readily available to painters. This crystalline solid appears to the human eye as a light robin’s-egg blue, a turquoise patina, a soft hue somewhere between green and blue. Thus, the Lady’s metal skin gains a thin, colorful coating made of copper chloride. On the coast, uncoated metal can come face-to-face with harsh seawater, a substance that is naturally full of salt-ions and carbonic acid. She’s green because we live surrounded by oxygen and when oxygen comes into contact with a metal like copper, it begins to tear away the electrons, which allows for the copper atoms to begin reacting with other particles. She is green because that’s the color of verdigris, a substance that both is and isn’t turquoise. She was brown because that’s the color of copper, an interesting chemical metal that occurs in a usable form frequently in nature. It’s a simple enough fact, and yet I have trouble wrapping my head around it. When residents first beheld Lady Liberty, they saw not an otherworldly, aqua-skinned allegory holding her lit torch to the sky, but a metallic, regal woman stretching upward from a granite plinth. It felt like a revelation to read that tiny detail in Ian Frazier’s New Yorker piece on Statue of Liberty green. Before she was the verdigris icon, patron saint of many a bespoke paint color, she was copper-skinned. While it’s hard for me to even imagine standing inside a crowd of that size, it’s harder still to imagine the Statue of Liberty herself, as she looked then. Still, over a million freezing New Yorkers came out (including a boat full of suffragettes, protesting the statue). The drapery was pulled off too soon (right in the middle of a speech), and the fireworks display had to be canceled and rescheduled. The weather was miserable and the ceremonial unveiling went poorly. It was a rainy October day in 1886 and the Statue of Liberty was shrouded in a French flag. It’s hard to imagine now, but people once gathered together freely, shoulders rubbing against shoulders, breath exchanged between lungs, bodies open to one another-all this closeness, almost a million people standing in a crowd just to watch a statue get undressed. 1765–72 (Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art) ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |