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Omar Melhem

Mrs. McMennamy

Academy Capstone- 1

1 October 2017

Chemistrys Influence on Art

No society is without art. Humanity feels an irresistible need to establish identity and

unity. Groups of people may express themselves through the styles of their structures, the colors

of their paints, or even the ideas they trade between each other. Many of the factors that

influenced the development of art were based in science. It could be said that weather influenced

certain forms of dance, such as how the tides inspired certain Polynesian dances. It could also be

established that stick-and-ball sports such as cricket or baseball were based off of physics

mechanics such as angular momentum. Surprisingly, art was significantly influenced by

principles based in chemistry as well. In fact, chemistry had a wide range of roles in shaping

historical art, both concrete and abstract.

When I was younger, my parents and grandparents would give me insight on the greatest

accomplishments of the Ancient Phoenicians, who we can trace our ancestry to. Aside from their

descriptions of the first alphabet, impressive navigation, and advanced wood-working skills, one

thing that fascinated me was a valuable purple dye that the Phoenicians learned to obtain from

seashells on the coast. The details on this dye were unknown to me, until I recently read A Short

History of Chemistry by J. R. Partington. The dye is Purple of Tyre (or Tyrian Purple) and is

extracted from mollusk shells in the Mediterranean Sea, which are crushed until a miniscule

amount of a yellow liquid is left, which turns a vibrant red-purple when left in the sun. The

beautiful dye was signature to the Phoenicians, because they not only had access to the raw
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material but years of experience. They were expert at blending different species of shellfish in

certain sequences of the process and adding extra secret ingredients so that only they could

produce the most prized colour of all, a rich deep purple which seemed crimson when held to the

light (Cartwright, 2016). This, of course, is a simplified outline of an extremely intensive and

complex process that still astounds chemists today. The science behind dyes is almost entirely

chemistry. For example, many dyes are metal salts that cannot bind to fabric alone and can only

do so with the assistance of mordants. The word mordant comes from the French mordre, to

bite, which is a visualization of the role mordants play and how they behave (Partington, 1937).

A popular example of mordant dyeing would be soaking a white shirt in a baking soda solution

before tie-dying it. Mordant dyeing is the most prominent form of dyeing textiles because the

most important salts used in dyeing containing metals such as copper, aluminum, or tin do not

favor binding to the plain fibers in fabric, but will readily bind to mordanted fabric in what are

considered metal lakes (Schweppe, 1979). This barely scrapes the surface; dyeing is incredibly

complex, and analyzing or replicating historical dyes today can be extremely tedious and

expensive. I had always wondered why my Lebanese family was always so proud of the

accomplishments of those who lived thousands of years ago, but I now have a new

understanding. Everything about the Phoenicians I learned from their proud history lessons, from

the large cedar ships to the invaluable dyes, define my culture and heritage. Tyrian Purple is a

chemical treasure that took years to perfect and millennia to replicate, and, according to my

grandparents, is one of the most defining inventions of the Phoenician Empire. It is a classic

example of chemistry influencing art.

One of my favorite museums of all time is the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. There, you

will find multiple exhibits dedicated to historical pieces of art, including vases, mosaics, carpets,
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books, daggers, and more. Intricate methods of metalwork, such as bidriware (zinc-based

metallurgy, in India) and repousse (special hammering technique of the metal, in Iran) are

displayed in magnificent artifacts from centuries ago (there are also carpets colored in detail

designs with dyes, whose importance was mentioned earlier). The earliest metallurgy can be

credited to the Ancient Egyptians. J. R. Partingtons book goes into great detail on the earliest

metallurgy. He hypothesizes that the first metal to be discovered was probably gold, extracted

from alluvial river deposits. The Ancient Egyptians might have actually known about copper

before gold, and silver was soon to follow. Bronze was a revolutionary breakthrough for

metallurgy, made from an alloy of tin and copper, although the source of the Ancient Egyptians

tin is still unknown to this day due to lack of tin deposits. Iron was extremely scarce compared to

other metals and was not used as often early on. Early iron from the region sometimes contained

nickel, hinting that meteorites were significant sources of iron. Metallurgy spread from there:

Cyprus became proficient in the brass industry, and the Hittites grew to become skilled in iron

production. Aside from art, metallurgy greatly influenced war as well, and while this is examined

more closely in my first paper, some products such as engraved weapons and armor were in fact

treasured works of art and similar works are displayed at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Not

only was metallurgy a driving force in creating historical art, but so were other processes, such as

the arts of glazed pottery and glass. Glazes containing copper compounds were used early on in

Ancient Egypt, which gave opaque blue to green glazes. Cobalt was used to color glass a striking

blue. Nearly clear, colorless glass was made early on as well with improved technique. Closed

furnaces were used for baking rather than open fires making products harder and more durable,

paving the way for more intricate designs on pottery and ceramics (Partington, 1937). Many of
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the great artifacts created by these civilizations have lasted centuries, or even millennia, and are

symbols of the amazing role chemistry played in art.

However, not all art is visual. Philosophy is a form of art heavily based in ideas. Some of

the most famous early philosophers were the Ancient Greeks, and many are familiar with some

of the teachings of Aristotle, Plato, or Socrates. Some of the topics of Greek philosophy lied in

astronomy, or psychology, or, indeed, chemistry. The topic of Ancient Greek chemistry is

explored in J. R. Partingtons book. The classic water, fire, air, and earth combination was in

fact developed by Greek philosophers, and not all at once, but over many years by multiple wise

men. Water, air, and then fire were separately pondered by three individual philosophers before

Empedocles suggested the idea of four basic roots of matter (elements), which were bound and

broken by forces of attraction and repulsion. Plato was the first to suggest the term elements,

and he also assumed that the most basic particle of each element was unique by its shape (water

was assumed to be shaped like an icosahedron, fire as a tetrahedron, air as an octahedron, and

earth as a cube). Of course, we know today that the concept behind these four elements was

not actually accurate, but chemistry is the study of matter and how it behaves, so in the historical

sense, the four elements is a pondering of chemistry. Greek chemistry was very ahead of its

time, and Aristotle was aware of a primitive process of distillation as he observed that water

vapor collected from sea water was purified. Aristotle was also able to differentiate mixtures and

solutions and described the irreversibility of a chemical change due to a change in properties (a

concept I have been learning for years in grade school science). Philosophical chemistry actually

persisted for centuries after the Ancient Greeks. The theory that all materials contain a ratio of

the four elements was accepted as late as the 1700s. Later writings even pondered the existence

of a fifth element, ether, which was a medium for light to travel through, and was accepted into
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the late 1800s (Partington, 1937). Of all the things that early philosophers theorized, a lot of

thinking went into chemistry.

Even though dyers did not think about the exact process of dyeing on a molecular level,

and Ancient metalsmiths were not precise in their identification of pure metals, and Greek

philosophers were incorrect in naming the elements, these are all considered chemistry, because

they are all ways of studying the composition and behavior of matter. Similarly, they all are

forms of art, and without them, the historical civilizations who produced them would lose a large

part of their unique identity.

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Works Cited

Cartwright, M. (2016, July 21). Tyrian Purple. Ancient History Encyclopedia. Retrieved

from https://www.ancient.eu/Tyrian_Purple/

Krebs, R. E. (2004). Groundbreaking scientific experiments, inventions, and discoveries

of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Partington, J. R. (1937). A short history of chemistry. New York: Dover.

Schweppe, H. (1979). Identification of Dyes on Old Textiles. Journal of the American

Institute for Conservation, 19(1), 14-23.