Francisco Benitez
Featured Artist
10
Spring
St. Peter, St. Catherine
Monastery, Sinai
As these works were
executed in the first few
centuries after the birth of
Christ, they are what we
would consider products of
late antiquity. The Fayum
portraits are the last breath
of the great Sikyonian
School, before expiring at
the dawn of the Byzantine
period. After the fall of the
Roman Empire, and when
Christianity was sweeping
most of the Western world,
we see the last examples
of encaustic painting in a series of precious panels
which are currently at the St. Catherine Monastery in
the Sinai, depicting Christ, the Virgin Mary, St. Peter.
These works laid the foundation for the ever-popular
and widespread icon painting tradition which
continues to this day. However, it was tempera that
took the torch, and until present icon painters traditionally
use tempera instead of encaustic.
At the end of the 6th century AD, encaustic
disappears from view. Already in the later Fayum
portraits, one sees a return to a more symbolic
and schematic way of representing faces; since
tempera was cheaper and easier to use, it began
to replace the more expensive and work-intensive
encaustic portraits of an earlier period.
Although it is impossible to say that it was
not practiced in certain quarters of the world,
perhaps in isolated communities in Greece or
Russia, encaustic disappeared from view for over a
thousand years. During the Renaissance, the only
artists who attempted to experiment with wax were
Lucas Cranach and Andrea Mantegna. It would
take the emerging and evolving scientific discipline
of archaeology to resurrect it from obscurity.
In the 1599, Pompeii was discovered, as were a
host of other sites throughout the ancient world in
the following centuries. Excavations at Herculaneum
began in 1738, and in the 18th century fervor
swept Europe with a passion for the antique--the
lost methods of the ancient artists held new appeal.
The 18th century was a very complex time since
the church was losing hegemony over the minds
and bodies of the population; scientific thought
was emerging at a meteoric pace, and art was
going through an identity crisis. As the idealism
and powerful impulses of the Renaissance had
dissipated, many artists and intellectuals sought
inspiration in the great traditions of the past—Pliny
suddenly became interesting, as did political ideas
developed initially in the ancient world, which
propelled the radical overthrow of a royalist autocratic
regime in France in the late 18th century.
One figure would emerge as the “discoverer”
of the ancient encaustic method—the Count
of Caylus. Caylus was a fervent French antiquarian,
artist, historian, and all-around intellectual, and
it is thanks to him that the encaustic method was
Comte de Caylus
rediscovered in the mid 18th century. He read Pliny
carefully and became obsessed with this ancient
technique which had held a prime place millennia
before the well-respected oil technique was even
developed. In the tumultuous times preceding the
French Revolution, Caylus would feud with other
intellectuals of the period, namely Diderot, for not
revealing the recipes of the ancient wax mixtures
Although Caylus’ “discovery” was greeted with a
certain amount of skepticism in artistic and intellectual
circles of 18th century France, they sowed
the seeds of a whole new generation of “investigators”
of the methods of the ancients which would
continue well into the 20th century.
The 19th century saw the publication of
numerous tracts on encaustic painting, namely
Jacques Nicolas Paillot de Montabert who published
an eight-volume set of books on painting techniques
(1829) which featured an entire volume on
encaustic, as well as a landmark study published
in 1884 by Frenchmen Henry Cros and Charles
Henry, entitled, L’encaustique.
St. Médard-des-Prés tomb objects
www.EAINM.com