Verdigris
The green crust on old copper, scraped off and ground into paint. Gorgeous, cheap, and prone to turning brown.
- Made from
- Copper exposed to vinegar or wine acids
- Name
- Probably vert de Grèce, 'green of Greece'
- Weakness
- Turns brown as a resin glaze
Verdigris is the name for green and blue-green copper acetates, the crust that forms when copper meets acid. Painters made it on purpose: in the Middle Ages, copper strips over vinegar, buried in dung for a few weeks (much like lead white), then scraped. In 18th-century Montpellier, women ran a cellar industry, stacking copper plates in clay pots with wine and scraping off the crystals; most of it was exported.
The name is a puzzle. Old French verte grez became English verdigris. One theory reads it as 'green of vinegar'; the more popular one is vert de Grèce, 'green of Greece', because the pigment was long imported from there. It sits near the app's jade and teal.
It was the brightest green available to painters for centuries, used in panel paintings, manuscripts and maps. Its weakness is time. Cooked into a resin glaze ('copper resinate'), it slowly turns brown, so many late-medieval and Renaissance landscapes and robes that were green now look brown or dark. In the Mystical Nativity of 1500 by Botticelli, painter of The Birth of Venus, the angels' blue-green robes have darkened.
The green patina on the Statue of Liberty is often called verdigris, but it's mostly other copper salts, sulfates and chlorides formed by weather. Painters dropped verdigris for steadier greens like viridian, after a detour through toxic arsenic greens. Its cousin malachite is a natural copper green.
Swatches
- Verdigris · copper acetate (approx.)
- Verdigris glaze · when new (approx.)
- Copper resinate · browned with age (approx.)
Colors
Sources
- Kühn, H. (1993). Verdigris and copper resinate. In Artists' Pigments, vol. 2. National Gallery of Art, Washington.
- National Gallery, London. Botticelli, Mystical Nativity: technical notes.
- Wikipedia, 'Verdigris'.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.