Natural Ivory black & Lamp black

Carbon blacks are among the oldest pigments used by humankind. It is quite logical to assume that the discovery of fire — approximately 500,000 years ago — led to the discovery of carbon black, when fires had burnt out and left behind their blackened residues. At some point, someone would presumably have had the curiosity to handle this black material and discover that it left a black trace when applied to rock or skin.

Indeed, scholars generally share this view: black, and particularly carbon black, is considered to be among the oldest pigments used by humankind¹.

As Michel Pastoureau writes in Black: The History of a Color (Princeton University Press, 2009):

“Ancient cultures had a more developed and nuanced awareness of the color black than contemporary societies do. In all domains, there was not one black, but many blacks.”

He continues by explaining that the struggle against darkness and the quest for light gradually led prehistoric and ancient peoples to distinguish different degrees and qualities of darkness and, consequently, to develop a relatively broad range of blacks.

Painting provides early evidence of this. From the Palaeolithic era onwards, artists used numerous pigments to produce black, and the range increased over the following millennia. By the Roman period, painters already possessed a highly diversified palette of blacks: matte and glossy, light and dark, intense and delicate, as well as blacks tending towards grey, brown and even blue.

Although Pastoureau refers not only to carbon blacks but also to mineral blacks, his observations make clear that carbon blacks — namely, blacks produced by burning a raw material — were among the earliest pigments available to artists. Depending on the raw material burned, different shades and qualities of black could be achieved.

Ivory black

Original ivory black was produced by calcining genuine ivory.

One of the most famous ancient Greek painters, Apellēs (Απελλής, 370-306 B.C.), the favourite artist of Alexander the Great and Ptolemy I, is traditionally credited with being the first to produce it. It was considered a luxury pigment, reserved for the finest artists, such as Apellēs².

It was known as elephantinon:

“Apelles conmentus est ex ebore conbusto facere, quod elephantinum vocatur (Apelles invented the method of making black from burnt ivory; the Greek name for this is elephantinon)”³, as per Pliny the Elder (23–79 A.D.).

Modern ivory black, of course, is not made from ivory. Since the international ban on elephant hunting in 1989, it has been produced by calcining natural animal bones. The traditional name, however, has remained.

Lamp black

Lamp black is another ancient pigment, consisting of soot produced by burning oil, fat or resin.

Its precise age is unclear, although it is evident that it was used by the Egyptians at least as early as around 2600 B.C.⁴.

Davy writes⁵:

“All the ancient authors describe the artificial Greek and Roman blacks as carbonaceous, and made either from the powder of charcoal or the decomposition of resin, (a species of lamp black) or from the lees of wine, or from the common soot of wood fires”.

Pliny the Elder (23–79 A.D.) describes “factories” dedicated to the mass production of the pigment⁶, while Vitruvius (1st century B.C)⁷ describes similar purpose-built structures at an even earlier date.