Cuni Encaustic

The Rediscovery of the long lost Encaustic formula.

By ancient Greek and Roman authors, we know that all artists of their time used a paint media made out of beeswax called encaustic. And that it was used for painting on canvas, wood, on marble walls and statues. Pliny mentions that you could still see in old abandoned Greek temples, wall paintings that had been under the rain, winds, sun for 300 years and they look “like new”. Romans were big collectors of Greek paintings like Julius Cesar who had a big collection of “encaustics”. Today the best preserved encaustic paintings are the wall paintings of Pompeii in Italy. The encaustic’s formula was lost with the fall of the Roman empire.Efforts by Renaissance artists to recover it failed. The most important research was carried out by Leonardo Da Vinci. After a lot of experiments, he thought he found the formula and what he thought it was encaustic, he used for one of his most famous murals, “The battle of Anghiari” While he was painting it, the paint stared falling off from the wall and he had to abandon it.The Spanish artist Jose Cuni rediscovered the original encaustic formula. His sons Pedro Cuni and Jorge Cuni throughout scientific work carried out in the Smithsonian institute in Washington D.C. and in Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science, comparing 2,000 years old Roman samples of paint Jose’s Cuni formula, were identical. Making this one of the most important discoveries in Art History.