Malachite
A banded green copper stone, worn as eye paint in Egypt and carved into whole rooms by Russian tsars.
- Made from
- Copper carbonate hydroxide mineral
- Name
- Greek molochites, 'mallow-green stone'
- Famous room
- Malachite Room, Hermitage, St Petersburg
Malachite is a copper carbonate mineral, green with swirling bands of light and dark. The name comes through Latin from Greek molochites, 'mallow-green stone', after the color of mallow leaves. Ground up, it makes a green pigment that painters used from antiquity until about 1800, when cheaper synthetic greens took over, its own synthetic twin among them and later the arsenic greens.
In ancient Egypt green, wadj, meant new life and resurrection, and the afterlife included a 'Field of Malachite'. Green malachite eye paint was part of burial goods, even in modest tombs. It was also a copper ore: at Timna in today's Israel, people mined and smelted it for copper thousands of years ago.
Its most lavish use is decorative. Russian tsars, supplied from mines in the Urals, paneled rooms in it; the Malachite Room of St Petersburg's Winter Palace (now the Hermitage) is the famous example. Malachite also appears in Chinese art from the Eastern Zhou period.
As a pigment it's only moderately lightfast and sensitive to acid, and it often sits next to its blue twin, azurite, in the same rocks; its man-made copper cousin is verdigris. The app's malachite is brighter and more electric than the stone, closer to a screen green; the mineral's real banded greens run nearer emerald and bottle green.
Swatches
- Malachite stone · light band (approx.)
- Malachite stone · dark band (approx.)
- Malachite · the app's color name
Colors
Sources
- Gettens, R. J. & FitzHugh, E. W. (1993). Malachite and green verditer. In Artists' Pigments, vol. 2. National Gallery of Art, Washington.
- State Hermitage Museum. The Malachite Room.
- Wikipedia, 'Malachite'.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.