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]

TIL: Female Lions Are Attracted to Black Manes | Today I Learned

What Do You Miss the Most? - Q&A | Live Free or Die

View All

Time dilation | Special relativity | Physics | Khan Academy

[Voiceover] So let’s revisit a scenario that we have seen in several videos, especially the last video, where we tried to find this neutral frame of reference. Let’s say we’re in spaceship A. We are in an inertial frame of reference. And let’s say right…

Kevin O’Leary’s First Richard Mille Ever l Mr. Wonderful's Premiere

Hey Mr. Wonder, why am I standing outside a Richard Mill store? I wonder if I’m picking up my first Richard Mill ever. I haven’t bought this brand yet, I haven’t collected it yet, ‘cause I had a lot of pops with the size of the watches. But maybe they’ve …

Are You Lightest In The Morning?

[Applause] So recently a friend of mine says to me, “Derek, you know you’re heaviest at night before you go to bed and lightest in the morning when you wake up.” Okay, but that doesn’t really seem to make sense. “Of course it does. Overnight, you’re not…

Diver Discovers a Strange Vehicle in the Detroit River | Drain the Oceans

I’ve lived in this area my entire life. Right on the United States border. Just a half a mile across the river from Detroit. I’ve been a scuba diver and a diving instructor for over 25 years. I was a broke university student and it was the only place I co…

Analyzing positive and negative intervals of polynomials

So we have a function f of x that’s written as the product of a bunch of first degree expressions. Now, if we obviously could also view this as a polynomial, especially if we expand this all out, it’ll have our more traditional form. But what’s nice about…

How I tricked my brain to like doing hard things

So for the majority of my life, I struggled to go to the gym consistently. Even though the gym has always been a part of my life to some degree, I grew up playing hockey, and all my brothers played hockey and went to the gym. So going to the gym was alway…

The People Who Were Turned Into Paint

More Articles