Biography

Ruth Ezra is Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews, where she specializes in the material and visual culture of early modern northern Europe. She is co-editor (with Francesca Borgo) of Waste, a special issue of West 86th (31.1, 2024) and Wastework: Early modern stories from the cutting room floor (Officina Libraria, 2024). A 2025 ACLS Fellow, she is currently at work on a book, Leaves of Glass: Mica between art and science in early modernity, which considers mica’s remarkable use across domains in the long seventeenth century.

Project Summary

Perhaps no passage in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History confounds art historians as much as his description of the “atramentum.” The dark varnish, whose invention Pliny attributes to Apelles, protected the surfaces of paintings from dust while also tempering the brilliance of their color and inserting virtual distance between viewer and object. It was as if the image were seen through a veil of Muscovy glass (“veluti per lapidem specularem intuentibus”). This project explores the possibility that early modern readers of the Natural History reified Pliny’s simile. Rather than trying to reconstruct Apelles’s varnish with recipes of burnt ivory, egg white or resin, they approximated its effects by painting and glazing with white mica (Muscovy glass). The research investigates three bodies of evidence—anonymous Interregnum portrait miniatures of Charles I; recommendations on painting from Francesco Lana de Terzi’s Prodromo (1670); and perspective boxes attributed to Daniel Bretschneider the Younger (d. 1658)—where leaves of mica (or its visual cognate talc) achieve the same veiling and distancing result Pliny so praises. As the project demonstrates, such a literal, material shortcut for “reconstructing” an ancient varnish came about in the seventeenth century when a nascent culture of conservation brought renewed attention to the “atramentum”'s powers of preservation. A corollary premise of the analysis is that Muscovy glass makes an eloquent if ambivalent entrance into the paragone debate, demonstrating the durability of painting on the one hand and its two-and-a-half dimensionality on the other. Acting as both a surface and a substrate, a glaze and an underlayer, a scrim and a coulisse, the mineral models nothing less than the structure of painting itself.