The People Who Were Turned Into Paint

less than 1m read

·Nov 10, 2024

There are four people in this painting. Three of them are made out of paint. The fourth is the paint.

The interior of a kitchen was painted in 1815, and like many paintings from that time, one of the colors used in it was mummy Brown, a pigment literally made from the ground up dried flesh of ancient mummies.

Today, we hollow mummies as fragile time capsules, but in the 1700s, there was a thriving mummy trade between Egypt and Europe. Ground up mummy was believed to have mystic healing powers, and the oil paints that could be made from it were highly valued.

So, mummy Brown was used in countless paintings for hundreds of years. It wasn't until the late 1800s that people began to really question its use. The dwindling supply of mummies didn't help either, and so it began to fall out of fashion.

The people who were turned into paint didn't ask to be. What they wanted was immortality, and they may have got what they wanted, but they also got an afterlife they didn't expect. Not one for their personal souls, but one for the anonymous beauty of the rotten, tari darkness.

Anyone can become… [Music]

Optimistic Nihilism

Why are people mean on Twitter? - Smarter Every Day 214

View All

My Favorite Watches From My Million Dollar Collection!

If they raised it, maybe they sold 50% of the business for a million bucks. I mean, if it’s worth 2 million, I’m throwing up. I went to the vault, and I got these puppies out—the hottest watch in the world. I was looking at it; oh, I was staring at this—t…

Matter and energy in food webs | Middle school biology | Khan Academy

In this video, we’re going to talk about food webs, which is really just a way of picturing how all of the matter and how all of the energy flows inside of an ecosystem. Now, when I talk about matter, I’m talking about the atoms in an ecosystem, the molec…

Semicolons and complex lists | The colon and semicolon | Punctuation | Khan Academy

Hello grammarians! So, if you’ve ever written a list of items or actions, you know that we use commas to separate the elements of that list. Sometimes, though, our lists get a bit complicated, and we have something called a complex list. When that’s the …

The Bike Riding Monk | Uncensored with Michael Ware

[music playing] MICHAEL: Russian Orthodox Christianity runs deep within the Night Wolves motorcycle club. They even have their own bike riding monk, a chaplain called Father Guriy. How can I resist? I have to meet him. Oh, Father Guriy himself. Ah, than…

10 Luxuries You Can Only Give Yourself

You know there’s a multi-billion dollar industry that caters specifically to the 1%. It’s designed for people with deep pockets, and most of the time, it’s a bit over the top just because it can be. But some of the best luxuries in life are only those you…

Confronting Kevin O’Leary | How He Spends $400 Million Dollars

By the end of the year, I’m writing off millions of dollars. That’s a mistake. I make money selling potatoes with people’s pictures on them. It’s a huge hit. You’re dead to me, and you are because I’m out. What’s up, you guys? It’s Graham here. So, as so…

The People Who Were Turned Into Paint

More Articles