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tion to be expected and the methods to be applied in the course of eliminative protection. Dr. Gyöngyvér Mara Biologist Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania Faculty of Technical and Social Scienses 530104 Miercurea Ciuc, Piaţa Libertăţii nr. 1 Phone: +40-266-317-121 Zsuzsanna Mara Painting conservator Muzeul Secuiesc, Miercurea Ciuc 530110 Str. Cetăţii nr. 2 Phone:+40-266-311-727 E-mail: zsuzsamara@yahoo.com Levente Domokos Raw Materials of Natural Pigments in Transylvania, their Prevalence and Use in Light of Literary and Ethnographic Data Displaying the influence of Renaissance floral design, painted furniture represents a notable form of material culture in Transylvania, where it spread owing to the work of painter cabinet-makers and became a new popular craft. The prices and standards set by urban cabinetmakers’ guilds and the price of imported colouring matters put no obstacles in the way of the spread of painted furniture. In order to meet increased demands, lowerprice products made by rural master craftsmen, who relied on local resources and raw materials, competed with the high-standard, set-price products made by members of cabinet-makers’ guilds. The craft as practised in the countryside was characteristically of a family character: often extending to related trades, it passed from father to son, slowly combining centuries-old tradition with technological innovation in the process. The subject of this study forms part of the author’s researches carried out for his university thesis. Without attempting to be comprehensive, it deals with the provenance and mention of natural pigments which were found in Transylvania and used by painter cabinet-makers, rural or urban guild-members, and it also offers a survey of the literature on Transylvanian pigments. As attested to by the cave drawings found in the Szamos Valley in Szilágy County, made in the Palaeolithic age, the earliest mineral pigments used in Transylvania were ferric oxide and coloured clays. Noteworthy mentions of painter cabinetmakers and raw materials are found relatively early in descriptions written inside and outside the country, which include works on painting, geology and geography, travelogues, dictionaries and grammar-books, as well as literary, medical and pharmacological works. Transylvanian and Hungarian data are found in Agricola’s works Bermannus sive de re metallica dialogues (1530) and De Re Metallica Libri XII, the latter, on mining, was published in 1556. In his book published in 1649 “On the Art of Painting”, F. Pacheco del Rio complains that since the Turks had occupied Hungary, no azurite mined in the Carpathians was available in Spain. The recipes published in Valentin Boltz’s Illuminirbuch (1549) and J. B. Pictorius’s Den Geheimen Illuminer-Kunst (1713 or 1742) were well-known in Transylvania and were probably used, too. Pictorius’s book was translated into Hungarian in 1802 by Sámuel Kendi, minister of Etád. The next known book on painting, “A short textbook on the preparation and properties of some paints used in cabinet-making and painting on architecture”, was written by Antal Ferencz at Csíkszenttamás in 1828 and is preserved in the Szekler Museum of Csík (now Ciuc, Rumania). A book of recipes that has come down incomplete was written by Péter Bálint at Csíkszentdomokos in the 1830s. The rich resources of mineral pigments found in Transylvania were well known in Europe. Apart from Agricola and F. P. del Rio, later travellers also made mention of raw materials used as pigments. Transylvanian sources containing several mentions of pigments and paints also include inventories, court records and guild books. Descriptions of quarries of pigments and mineral paints with no claim for comprehensiveness appeared in both the geological-geographical and ethnographical literature. The literature on conservation and restoration also introduces recipes of various pigments or recommendations on their quality, but mostly without their provenance. Since utilisation of minerals as pigments is not a primary target in mining, geologists mostly make a mere mention of the fact that the minerals or raw materials in question can be used as paint. Ethnographers make mention of earth paints being mined near a village, but offer no exact position. Identification of sites runs into several difficulties. Depletion of mines and quarries, or abandonment of sites for economic reasons, rendered survival of relevant data more difficult. Identification of sites was also made difficult by changes in place-names over the times, their loss in communal memory, as well as by changes of borders, natural features and environment. The identification of the sites of coloured earth and pigments used in Transylvania can be attempted on the bases of data found in the literature cited above, through ethnographical collection work and in the course of inspection of sites. Parallel and subsequent to these, a comparison of samples collected with the pigments found on items must be carried out. Levente Domokos Conservator student Muzeul Molnár István 535400 Cristuru Secuiesc Phone: +40-266-242-580 E-mail: domokoslev@freemail.hu 188
