Vitruvius-like synthesis of Egyptian Blue using Roman coins as copper source

What is it about?

The modern synthesis of Egyptian Blue has been attempted - mostly with success- by many researchers, since the scientific community has been working on this experimentation for more than a century. The aim is that of reconstructing the chaine operatoire used in the past to produce this pigment, among the first synthetic ones in the history, whose colour is due to the blue copper silicate cuprorivaite. Almost all the experiments carried out up to now in this sense have used malachite or commercial CuO as copper source in the receipt, contrarily to what stated by Vitruvius who described the procedure as using copper filings, probably obtained from scrap metal. The aim of this paper is that of filling this gap in the literature in the direction of the use of alloys filings. For this reason, copper filings from two Roman coins of private collection were used to synthesize Egyptian Blue, and the results were compared with different attempts made with malachite and with two ancient samples of archaeological origin.

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