Green pigments
[2] It is a bright, high intensity colour used in oil and acrylic based artist's paints, and in other applications.
Its name comes from the natural pigments that form a patina on copper, bronze, and brass as it ages.
Another method was to put copper plates in clay pots filled with distilled wine.
[9] Paolo Veronese used verdigris with lead white and some yellow in The Adoration of the Magi, at the National Gallery in London.
It was mixed with egg or with the sap of the acacia plant, and used to paint papyrus manuscripts and the walls of tombs.
[12] It was also widely used in China from antiquity, first in painting landscapes, and then, from the 5th century BC until the 3rd century AD, to make green inks, when the official palette of colors, under the influence of Confucianism, was reduced to blues made with azurite, and greens made with malachite.
[13] Artists in India imported malachite from Turkestan for murals, and monks in Tibet ground it coarsely to preserve the intensity of the color in manuscripts.
In Latin America, the Teotihuacan civilisation, which ruled in Mexico between 300 and 650, AD, made murals using crushed malachite, which was mixed with chalk for lighter shades, or mixed with blue from azurite or lapis-lazuli to make blue greens, or with yellow ochre to make yellow-greens.
In some of Ducco's paintings the upper flesh colors deteriorated, and the green under layer has become visible.
They were also used by Native American artists in North America, particularly the Hopis, who used them to color their ceremonial sand paintings.
While it makes a beautiful rich green, the color of the emerald stone, it is highly toxic, due to a main ingredient, arsenic.
Because of its toxic arsenic content, it became a popular rodenticide and insecticide,[19] Emerald green was particularly popular with the Impressionists, including Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, both of whom in 1888 placed vivid reds next to Emerald green to create jarring contrasts in their paintings Arlésiennes (Mistral) and The Night Cafe.
