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]

Teacher Tim Vandenberg shares how mastery learning worked for his class | Homeroom with Sal

Ice Age Cave Art: Unlocking the Mysteries Behind These Markings | Nat Geo Live

View All

Some Surprising Things

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. What’s normal? Are you normal? Well, today let’s bathe our brains with those questions and scrub down with things that are surprising and counterintuitive. What does it mean to be normal in the first place? Well, maybe it just …

Index Funds Are Under Attack

What’s up, Graham? It’s guys here, so I hope you’re sitting down for this because we got a lot to talk about today. First of all, it looks like the IRS has been listening to an awful lot of Sting lately because it’s apparent that they took inspiration fro…

When to buy a great business

Well, I won’t comment on the three companies that you’ve named, but in general terms, unless you find the prices of a great company really offensive, if you feel you’ve identified it… By definition, a great company is one that’s going to remain great for …

In the 19th Century, Going to the Doctor Could Kill You | Nat Geo Explores

[Music] They deliver babies. They help you when you’re sick. They are the ones who examine all the things doctors keep her health in check. They spend years of training to do it. But that wasn’t always the case. [Music] Medicine for most of the 19th cent…

The 6 things I wish I knew when I was younger...

And like I said, life isn’t a race to the finish line; it’s a journey. And the journey is what makes life beautiful. It’s not the finish line. That’s something I wish I learned a lot earlier on, because as a teenager especially, it would have saved me a l…

Once you identify the problem and fix it, you can always launch again.

Product is out there and nobody uses it. What do you do? Um, cry? Just kidding. Um, again, like the best Founders just view everything like we talked about earlier, like they’re learning, they’re sponges. So, I think they just treat this as something lik…

The People Who Were Turned Into Paint

More Articles