Primary Sources: A Natural History of the Artist's Palette

Brighter yellows were, from antiquity, made from synthetic compounds of tin, antimony, and lead. The ancient Egyptians knew how to combine lead with antimony ore, and in fact a natural mineral form of that yellow compound (lead antimonate) was also used as an artists’ material. It could be found on the volcanic slopes of Mount Vesuvius, which is how it came to be associated with Naples: from the seventeenth century a yellow composed of tin, lead, and antimony was often called “Naples yellow”. Other recipes for a yellow of similar appearance specified mixing the oxides of lead and tin. The ingredients weren’t always too clear, actually: when Italian medieval painters refer to giallorino, you can’t be sure if they mean a lead-tin or lead-antimony material, and it is unlikely that the painters recognised much distinction. Before modern chemistry clarified matters from the late eighteenth century, names for pigments might refer to hue regardless of composition or origin, or vice versa. It could all be very confusing, and from a name alone you couldn’t always be sure quite what you were getting — or, for the historian today, quite what a painter of long ago was using or referring to.

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