Egg tempera was the most common paint in the Middle Ages.
While medieval painting was primitive in many ways, it stands out even today for its use of brilliant, jewel-like colors. Artists used pigments bound with several different substances to produce bright, long-lasting works. The most common medieval paint types were more difficult to use than modern oil and acrylic paints, making the beautiful images that still endure from that time period even more impressive.
Egg Tempera
Egg tempera was the medieval paint of choice for illuminating manuscripts and painting panels coated with plaster gesso. A simple mixture of ground pigment and egg -- usually the yolk, but sometimes both the yolk and white -- is thinned with water. Tempera dries very quickly, making it unforgiving of an artist's mistakes. It produces a brightly colored, matte finish that is slightly lighter hued dry than wet. Because the paint cannot be easily layered or blended, the artist must produce shading with fine hatch marks.
Glue Paints
Artists in China used a mixture of pigment and animal glue to paint on paper during the Middle Ages. The glue acted as a binder, performing the same role as the egg yolk in egg tempera. Common types of glue included fish glue, ox glue, stag-horn glue and donkey hides. In addition to binding the pigment particles to one another and to the paper, the glue acts as a protective coating against the harmful effects of environmental exposure.
Fresco Painting
Fresco painting uses pigment dissolved in water, applied to a wet plaster surface. When the plaster dries, it chemically fixes the paint. Fresco painting is visually striking, but logistically difficult, since all of a given area must be painted in one sitting before the plaster dries. The artist Giotto pioneered fresco painting during the late Middle Ages, but the art form did not gain real prominence until the Renaissance.
Oil Paint
Oil paint was invented in the 7th century in Afghanistan, and made its way slowly westward across Europe during the medieval period. Though it did not become widely available until the Renaissance, when it quickly replaced egg tempera as the preferred medium, Jan van Eyck mixed paints using an innovative combination of oil and egg to produce his masterpiece, "The Arnolfini Portrait," in the final years of the Middle Ages.
