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]

The Murder of Glenn Felts | Badlands, Texas

Everyone Is Wrong About Bitcoin: “Have Fun Staying Poor!”

View All

15 Reasons Why You Need To Have Haters

Are haters good or bad? Now you might have asked yourself this at least once, but until you reach a certain level in life, you’ll encounter very few haters—not because you’re a good person, but because you don’t make a difference yet. But the moment you b…

Climate Change is Boring

Climate change is boring. Don’t get me wrong. It is incredibly important. It is just that the story of climate change is not especially compelling. And that is when the carbon dioxide concentration reached 400 parts per million. When I started making thi…

5 Habits Of The Sigma Male

I’m sure that you have heard of the alpha and beta males at some point in your life. In popular culture, these terms, based on the alphabet, are used to describe male personality types. An alpha male can be considered the man at the top of the dominance h…

Meth in the City (Clip) | To Catch a Smuggler | National Geographic

If you take a quick look at this, so you don’t see anything. Okay. The only thing that might give it away is this part, what we glued it again, so that it’s an indication that somebody opened it up and glued it back again. Now, you can see here the vein,…

Saving the Florida Wildlife Corridor | National Geographic

[Music] Florida is like no other place on earth. It’s the land, it’s the water, it’s the people. And the Florida wildlife corridor is the backbone that connects it all. But we are seeing changes because of those thousand people a day that are moving to Fl…

Worked example: finding a Riemann sum using a table | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

Imagine we’re asked to approximate the area between the x-axis and the graph of f from x equals 1 to x equals 10 using a right Riemann sum with three equal subdivisions. To do that, we are given a table of values for f. I encourage you to pause the video …

The People Who Were Turned Into Paint

More Articles