Encaustic: Or, Count Caylus's method of painting in the manner of the ancients. To which is added a sure and easy method for fixing of crayons — Text and Context

From Pliny’s Passage to Practical System

The opening pages frame encaustic as a revival of ancient painting with burnt wax, citing Pliny as the sole classical authority. Müntz acknowledges that reducing this invention to a regular system would be tedious, yet he proceeds to lay the whole before the Royal Society. The structure mirrors a scientific demonstration: a problem (Pliny’s obscure phrase), a proposed solution (Caylus’s method), and a step-by-step procedure. The reader is positioned as both witness to a historical recovery and participant in a reproducible technique.

The Palette: Chemistry and Sympathy

Müntz evaluates pigments not by hue alone but by their chemical affinity with wax. Terra di Siena crude is deemed unfit because its pores are too close for wax to penetrate, and it contains a nitrous principle with which wax cannot sympathise. Calcination dispels this principle, allowing the wax to enter freely. Similarly, smalt is too gritty for solid masses, while Prussian blue equals ultramarine in encaustic. The author’s language—sympathise, pores, nitrous principle—reveals a materialist understanding of painting as a physical union between medium and pigment.

Black Pigments and the Flemish Glaze

Among blacks, bone black is singled out for sweetness and transparent warmth, especially for landscapes and figures. Müntz notes that bone black mixed with white alone produces softer, more natural turning tints than any other colours. He recommends mutton trotters calcined as the best source, and observes that Flemish painters use it extensively for glazing. This attention to a specific black’s capacity for glazing—and its superiority over ivory or blue black in certain contexts—shows the author’s practical experience and his willingness to depart from conventional oil-painting practice.

Crayon Fixing and the Promise of Durability

The appended method for fixing crayons addresses a perennial problem: pastel’s fragility. Müntz claims that colours fixed with wax will not grow black as they do in oil, implying that encaustic offers a stability that oil painting cannot guarantee. The treatise thus moves from historical justification through pigment chemistry to a concrete solution for preserving powdery media. The promise of durability—pictures that last—echoes Pliny’s tradition and gives the manual a practical urgency beyond antiquarian interest.

Readers approaching this manual should attend to the interplay between historical authority and empirical testing. Müntz does not simply repeat ancient recipes; he adapts them through trial, noting which colours fail and why. The work rewards those who read its pigment descriptions as chemical analyses rather than mere lists. Its value lies less in the revival of a lost art than in the window it opens onto 18th-century material knowledge and the craft of making colour permanent.

The rain made the old manual’s wax recipes feel almost cozy, and I lingered over Count Caylus’s careful notes on pigments long past tea. That patient, exacting attention to builders’ materials—lime and brick and timber—stayed with me. Later, browsing idle, my eye caught Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir: A Study in Early Mohammadan Architecture — Story, Setting & Ideas on a shelf, and I realized the same quiet devotion to structure and method had simply followed me there.