If you’ve been following the Artifact Lab blog you are now familiar with the two Egyptian wooden heads and the work in progress on them. Those heads are complex since they are composed of several materials that the conservator has to understand to treat them.

So let’s explore an important but now almost lost of their aspects: polychromy. Indeed, 99% of the colors on the heads are lost but some remains allow us to figure out what colors were originally theirs.

Mapping of E17910 red paint layer.

Let’s have a look at the real colors left on the heads:

E17911 – On the left: detail of black paint on the the wig located on the right of the head (x 10 magnification) ; On the right: Detail of red paint on the left ear (x 10 magnification).

E17910 – Detail of the red paint above and under left eye and red paint below the right eye (x 10 magnification).

The wig is black (even if it looks blue on the picture !). The red is ochre, produced by reducing iron oxides to powder.

All Egyptian statues (and generally statues from other ancient civilizations) were completely painted. Only a few of them had their polychromy preserved, and it is especially rare on wooden artifacts because of many alteration factors that damaged these objects. The two heads were buried in a grave, several feet underground and the groundwater could rise very irregularly and completely overflow the tomb and its contents. The wood suffers a lot from humidity changes: indeed, this material always tries to keep its own moisture content stable, according to the environment moisture. That involves cycles of giving off and taking moisture; if those cycles occur too many times, the wood can’t follow and breaks generally appear.

If the wood is covered with a polychromy layer, it falls off since it can’t follow the movements of the wood. The wood is also susceptible to damage by other substances, like different types of salts and other alkaline substances whose action is increased by humidity.

That’s what explains that on the heads, the few areas of color left are in a bad condition; let’s try to explain what’s going on under the sediment!

To give you an idea, here is a stratigraphic representation of what a nice and undisturbed polychromy (if that exists!) should look like:

The wood is covered with a preparatory layer; it allows the surface to be even so that the paint layer can stick better to it. That’s it about the theory, let’s see what we have in reality:A lot less pretty and legible ! We can’t say whether the preparatory layer exists or not, and the paint is covered with a modern application of paraffin wax that wasn’t applied correctly on the wood; indeed the white material that covers some areas of the surface and of the polychromy is a paraffin deposit.

White paraffin deposits on the paint and the wood.

E17911 – The paint layer is poorly attached to the surface and termites didn’t spare it.

The paint layer is poorly attached to the wood and the paraffin used to strengthen the heads in the field (during the 19^th century) is the only thing maintaining them.

While we are grateful that there is still some polychromy remaining…paraffin isn’t such a good thing ! It will be the topic of a next post to come.