Why don't Dunhuang murals fade for thousands of years?

1600 years ago, China had high skills in the invention and production of pigments and chemical technology. The pigments of Dunhuang murals mainly come from imported gems, natural minerals and synthetic compounds.

Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes, with the help of the different ages of Dunhuang Grottoes, can not only prove that China was one of the first countries to use lapis lazuli, verdigris, Lithuanian red alum and mica powder as pigments in paintings, but also show that China's ancient chemical technology and pigment preparation skills were at the world's leading level at that time.

Dunhuang Grottoes are not only a world-famous art treasure house, but also a colorful museum of pigment specimens. A large number of painting art pigment samples from the Northern Dynasties to the Meta-algebra for thousands of years have been preserved, which is an important material for studying the chemical history of ancient pigments in China and even the world.

Wang Jinyu, a researcher at Dunhuang Research Institute, used scientific methods to combine the analysis results of modern instruments with the records of ancient documents, and took more than 30 common colors such as red, yellow, green, blue, white, black and brown in Dunhuang murals as samples. After scientific analysis, he put forward the above viewpoint.

As the artistic language of traditional Chinese painting, the extended data lines and colors have a high degree of generalization and expressiveness, and people with distinctive personalities and complicated hearts can be created with concise pen and ink. Dunhuang murals have inherited this tradition in an all-round way and developed to meet the needs of creating new images. The draft lines of murals are bold, free and strong.

With several red lines, a wild bison emerged from the wall; The refreshing wiring shows the vivid expression of a group of hunters scrambling to find food; The characters and architectural department in the picture of "The Mountain Gods Send Pillars" are sketched casually, and there is no decay (charcoal). Obviously, this is a vivid sketch. In casual writing, there is often another natural interest between pen and ink.

The sculpting line of Dunhuang frescoes is strict. The early iron line drawing was beautiful and smooth, and was mostly used to express handsome and delicate figures, such as immortals and flying stars in the Western Wei Dynasty. The combination of line drawing and image is seamless. Orchid leaf painting was popular in the Tang Dynasty, with a pen in the center, round and full of sweat, soft outside and rigid inside.

References:

Baidu encyclopedia-Dunhuang murals