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Concept
Lead-tin yellow
Summary
Lead-tin yellow is a yellow pigment, of historical importance in oil painting, sometimes called the "Yellow of the Old Masters" because of the frequency with which it was used by those famous painters.
The name lead-tin yellow is a modern label. During the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries when it was in widest use, it was known by a variety of names. In Italy, it was giallorino or giallolino. In other countries of Europe, it was massicot, genuli (Spanish), Plygal (German), general (English) or mechim (Portuguese). All of these names were often applied to other yellow pigments as well as lead-tin yellow.
Lead-tin yellow historically occurred in two varieties. The first and more common one, today known as "Type I", was a lead stannate, an oxide of lead and tin with the chemical formula Pb2SnO4. The second, "Type II", was a silicate with the formula . Lead-tin yellow was produced by heating a powder mixture of lead oxide and tin oxide to about 900 °C. In "Type II" the mixture also contained quartz. Its hue is a rather saturated yellow. The pigment is opaque and lightfast. As a type of lead paint, it presents the hazard of lead poisoning if ingested, inhaled, or contacted.
The origin of lead-tin yellow can be dated back to at least the thirteenth century when Type II was applied in frescos, perhaps having been discovered as a by-product of crystal glass production. Until the eighteenth century, Type I was the standard yellow used in oil painting.
Lead-tin yellow was widely employed in the Renaissance by painters such as Titian (Bacchus and Ariadne), Bellini (The Feast of the Gods) and Raphael (Sistine Madonna), and during the Baroque period by Rembrandt (Belshazzar's Feast), Vermeer (The Milkmaid), and Velázquez (Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan).
In the early eighteenth century, lead-tin yellow was almost completely replaced in use by Naples yellow. After 1750, no paintings seem to have been made containing the pigment, and its existence was eventually forgotten for reasons that are not entirely clear.
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