The Tempera Painting Technique: History and Details

Knowing the history of painting techniques and materials can be of great benefit in understanding and applying these techniques.

Among the most important and most used techniques in history is tempera. This technique consists, in its basic form, of a mixture of egg yolk, pigment and water. This was used from rock times through the Renaissance, where it reached its peak, and continues to be used to this day.

Here, painter Eilyahu Mirlis will explain more about this technique and its history.

History

Eilyahu Mirlis shares the fact that the tempera painting technique is one of the oldest known formal painting techniques. A form of the same cast with the encaustic technique was used for the decoration of the sarcophagi of ancient Egypt. In particular, the Fayum mummy portraits (50 BC - 250 AD).

The technique was already known in the classical world. It was the main medium used in painting on wood and illumination of manuscripts in the Byzantine world, in the Middle Ages and European Renaissance.

As talented painter, Mirlis explains, after the fall of Rome in the West and the onset of the Middle Ages (c.400-800), the focus was on Constantinople, the center of the Eastern Roman Empire. There the tempera painting technique gradually replaced encaustic, to become the main medium for painting icons, as well as painted religious books, known as illuminated manuscripts.

However, despite its ancient origins, the tempera method is perhaps most associated with medieval painting in Europe between 1200 and 1500. The use of tempera declined in the early 15th century. The Italian artists continued to use it avidly until the beginning of the High Renaissance, at the beginning of the 16th century. Mirlis shares the fact that later, the tempera painting technique would be fused with different oils and resins to give life to what we know today as oil painting.

Tempera

The tempera painting technique, what does it consist of?

Eilyahu Mirlis, who has been using the tempera painting technique for creating most of his paintings, shares that temple is a word of Italian origin. It comes from the phrase "pingere a tempera", which means "to paint in tempera". It is generally made with egg yolks combined with pigment to form an emulsion that could be diluted with water and applied with a brush.

However there are many variables of temples: water temper, varnish temper, casein temper, wax soap temper, oil temper, etc. Different temples have different visual and plastic characteristics. This makes tempering to date the coarsest and most complete technique that exists.