ENCAUSTIC PAINTING. — It is among the oldest known types of painting employing a developed technique; essentially, encaustic painting may be defined as that which uses wax as a binder and is subjected to a process involving heat (ceris pingere ac picturam inurere, says Pliny).
Documented in Egypt as early as the 7th century B.C., it later passed to Greece as a technique characteristic of painting on stone and marble and, subsequently, in the decoration of sculpture and architecture. Certainly used by Polygnotus, it was perfected in the 4th century B.C. and reached a high degree of development with the major painters of ancient Greece: Nida, Aristides, Pamphilus, Pausias, Thespis, etc. The stelae of Pagasae constitute a remarkable series of Hellenistic wax paintings, and the portraits from el-Fajjūm in Egypt, dating from the 1st to the 4th century A.D., are among the most important surviving documents of encaustic painting.
Research into the technique of encaustic painting was very much in vogue in the eighteenth century, when attempts were made to revive its procedure, and there were artists such as Mengs and scholars such as Requeno, Viglioli, and Donner, who carried out careful studies for the reconstruction of the various methods of encaustic painting used in antiquity.
From two passages of Pliny (Höst. natur., XXXV, 39, 41), supplemented by references in Lucian, Var-
(from H. Schulz, Encaustic und Fische mit antiker Grundism, Monaco, 1908, p. 13) ENCAUSTIC PAINTING — Portrait of a woman (ca. 159 A.D.) from el-Fajjūm (Egypt) — Berlin, Milan.
rone, and Vitruvius, the three ancient techniques of encaustic painting can be reconstructed: with wax, with the cestrum, and with the brush.
In the first, a wax ground was spread on hot, perhaps with the addition of the basic or preparatory color, using a cautery or metal rod, with which the other colors were then also applied. This technique was used for painting on stone, marble, and also wood. The second was restricted to encaustic painting on ivory: the cestrum was used, an implement that was pointed at one end (sericulum), to fix the hot wax onto the polished surface, and flat at the other, like a spatula, for the subsequent retouching with heat. These two techniques were later joined by a third, perhaps around 400 B.C. The penicillus, or brush, was used, until then known only for tempera and fresco painting; with it, hot wax, prepared beforehand and diluted with color, was spread directly, both on stone and on wood. Pliny says that this technique was also employed in coloring ships, since the color thus spread was resistant to the sun, salt water, and winds.
Although modern opinions concerning the technique of the Pompeian and Roman paintings are no longer unanimous regarding the use of encaustic painting (recent studies have shown, for example, that the paintings in the House of Livia on the Palatine are frescoes, since all the wax belongs to later restorations), it is nevertheless certain that the encaustic technique continued after the fall of the Empire, in the aforementioned paintings from el-Fajjūm and also in other examples of Byzantine art, until at least the 6th century.