Scottish Renaissance painted ceilings
[4] The paint used employed protein size made from waste kid leather or parchment called "skrowis", with chalk and pigments, including natural ochres, vermilion, and orpiment often mixed with indigo to form vibrant greens.
[6] In England, a painter Leonard Fryer made an equivalent use of "sweet varnish" to enhance imitation wood graining at Oatlands Palace.
However, it is recorded that in 1554, Edinburgh painters led by Walter Binning assaulted an outsider, David Warkman, who had been painting a ceiling.
As at Crathes, beams at Traquair House and Sailor's Walk, Kirkcaldy, carry proverbial and biblical admonitions, written in Middle Scots.
Culross Palace, built by Sir George Bruce of Carnock, has a variety of painted interiors including suites of emblems, geometric patterns and biblical scenes.
The National Museum of Scotland displays a ceiling from Rossend Castle, Burntisland, Fife,[26] and a screen from Wester Livilands, near Stirling.
Painted beams from Midhope Castle were moved to Abbey Strand, Edinburgh, and a ceiling from Prestongrange House is at Merchiston Tower, though these last two are not regularly open to the public.
[33] Prestongrange's ceiling painted for Mark Kerr and Helen Leslie in 1581 has comic figures from Richard Breton's Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, Paris (1565).
[34] Nicolas Elphinstone gave James VI a copy of this book, and there was another in the library of Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney who died in 1593.
At Rossend Castle (now in the National Museum of Scotland), emblems by Claude Paradin,[38] Gabriele Simeoni and Alciato were used, again with ornamental detail from Vredeman de Vries's Grottesco, with devices of European princes.
A ceiling at Riddle's Court in Edinburgh has the eagle of the Holy Roman Empire combined with a thistle, perhaps to commemorate the visit of the Duke of Holstein in 1598.
[39] Inscriptions on beams salvaged from Carnock House, Stirlingshire, the oak timber dated to 1589 by dendrochronology, include stoic advice in Scots from Gaius Musonius Rufus (possibly via the English author William Baldwin) with Biblical proverbs.
These demonstrate the use of renaissance pattern books by painters and patrons in Scotland, and coupled with copious classical quotations, the wealth and topicality of the library of Alexander Seton.
Sime rescued a part of the Apocalypse painting from Edinburgh's Castlehill and made a series of coloured record drawings now held by the Historic Environment Scotland.
At the end of the century, Andrew Lyons, artist and antiquarian, made drawings of a number of ceilings (also held by HES/RCAHMS), and published articles in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, Scotland, PSAS.
Frank Baines the supervising architect from the Office of Works sought advice from the expert chemist Arthur Pillans Laurie of Heriot-Watt University in 1912.
[44] More recently, Michael Bath, emeritus professor of English, Strathclyde University, has re-assessed the corpus with a particular focus on the emblems used and their origins and meanings to the Scottish patrons.
Bath has published a number of articles and a detailed illustrated 2003 monograph exploring sources with a useful comprehensive inventory of examples both extant and destroyed.
