Close Examination: Fakes, mistakes and discoveries at the National Gallery, review
Scientific evidence can be invaluable but it has to be used with caution and always in tandem with historical research. For example, Corot’s ravishing plein-air sketch The Roman Campagna, with the Claudian Aqueduct has always been dated to about 1826, soon after the artist’s arrival in Rome. However, the green pigment called viridian that Corot used throughout the picture only became available to artists in the 1830s. The landscape wasn’t a fake and for stylistic reasons couldn’t have been painted later than the mid-1820s. All became clear when art historians did further research and discovered that the firm that sold artists’ supplies to Corot in Paris started making the newly developed colour available to selected customers in the 1820s, long before it came into widespread use.
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/blue.htm
Ultramarine pigment, laboriously isolated from lapiz lazuli from one Afghani mine, cost more than its weight in gold. There were no other stable intensely saturated blues suitable for oil painting. On 04 February 1828 synthetic ultramarine entered the world, made from anhydrous sodium sulfate, kaolin, silica and sulfur. By the tonne.
Artists suddenly could afford to paint the sky. Impressionism exploded,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism#Timeline
Damned science – always ruining a bad thing.
Mistakes and Discoveries? Uncle Al just received his Chemical & Engineering News 88(28) 3 (2010) 12 July, “From the Editor.” The ACS 2009 Salary Survey is published. Seize a solid surface and hang tight…
“…unemployment among chemists had reached 3.9%, the highest rate of unemployment among chemists in at least the past 20 years.”
What spacetime continuum does the ACS inhabit? Uncle Al suggests ACS members who find this Official Truth personally offensive drop the Editor a line of two of professional dissenting opinion,
edit.cen@acs.org