Egg tempera is paint made from powdered pigment bound with egg yolk and thinned with water. The yolk is the binder, doing the job that linseed oil does in oil paint and acrylic polymer does in acrylic. It was the dominant medium for panel painting in Europe for centuries before oil replaced it, and it produces a luminous, matte, slightly translucent surface that no other medium quite matches.
How it behaves
Three properties define working with it, and all three follow from the yolk.
- It sets almost instantly and cures slowly. A stroke is touch-dry in seconds. Full curing, as the yolk proteins cross-link, takes months, and the film keeps hardening for years.
- You cannot blend it. This is the big one. Because it sets on contact there is no wet window, so tone is built up with hundreds of fine parallel or crosshatched strokes laid over one another. Gradation comes from optical mixing, not from smearing two colors together.
- It must go on a rigid support. The cured film is hard and inflexible. On a canvas that expands and contracts with humidity it will crack, which is why traditional tempera is painted on a wooden panel coated with true gesso.
That last point is worth connecting to something. True gesso, chalk or gypsum bound with animal glue, is rigid and cracks on flexible canvas, which is exactly why modern acrylic gesso replaced it for canvas work. Tempera on a panel is the one context where the original material is still the right answer. Our guide to what gesso is covers the distinction.
A short and accurate history
Egg tempera is old, and a common claim that it was developed during the Renaissance has the story backward. It was the medium the Renaissance grew out of and then abandoned.
Egg-bound paint appears in the Roman period, including on some of the Fayum mummy portraits from Egypt, which were painted in a mixture of encaustic and tempera in the first few centuries AD. It became the standard medium of Byzantine icon painting, then of medieval and early Renaissance panel painting across Europe.
It was displaced during the 1400s, not the 1800s. Oil painting, refined in the Netherlands and taken up rapidly in Italy, could do things tempera could not: blend softly, build deep transparent glazes, be reworked for days, and be painted large on flexible canvas. Within a couple of generations tempera had gone from default to specialist.
Who actually painted in it
This gets misreported often enough to be worth stating plainly. The great egg tempera painters are the generations before the High Renaissance:
- Duccio di Buoninsegna, whose Maesta for Siena Cathedral, finished in 1311, is tempera and gold on panel
- Giotto, Simone Martini, and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti
- Gentile da Fabriano, whose Adoration of the Magi of 1423 is tempera on panel and now hangs in the Uffizi
- Fra Angelico, who painted several versions of the Annunciation in tempera on panel
- Sandro Botticelli, whose Birth of Venus of around 1485 is tempera on canvas, unusually for the period
Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael are frequently listed as egg tempera painters and it is misleading. Leonardo was among the artists who drove the switch to oil. Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling is fresco, a different technique entirely in which pigment is bound into wet plaster. They worked at the moment tempera was being superseded, and they are remembered for the media that replaced it.
One 1320 work is worth naming precisely because its details circulate wrongly: Pietro Lorenzetti's polyptych of that year is the Tarlati Polyptych, tempera and gold on panel, commissioned by Bishop Guido Tarlati and still in the church of Santa Maria della Pieve in Arezzo. Its saints are Donatus, John the Evangelist, John the Baptist and Matthew.
The modern revival
Tempera never entirely disappeared, and the twentieth century brought a genuine revival. Andrew Wyeth is the best-known modern practitioner, and the dry, granular, minutely hatched surface of his paintings is the medium doing what only it can do. Pietro Annigoni, the Italian portrait painter, worked extensively in tempera grassa, an emulsion of egg yolk with a little oil that keeps some of tempera's crispness while allowing a little more blending.
Making a batch
It is genuinely simple, and it must be made fresh. Egg tempera has no preservative and spoils within a couple of days even refrigerated, so mix what you will use in a session.
- Separate a yolk from a raw egg. It must be raw. A cooked yolk has no binding power at all and will not make paint.
- Remove the yolk sac. Roll the yolk gently on a paper towel to dry it and shed the clinging white, then hold it over a jar, pinch the sac with your fingers or nick it, and let the yolk run out. Throw the empty sac away. Skipping this leaves lumps in the paint.
- Thin it. Add roughly an equal volume of distilled water and stir gently until smooth. Stir rather than whisk, since froth in the mixture leaves bubbles in the paint.
- Make a pigment paste separately. Grind the dry pigment with a little distilled water on a slab until it is a smooth cream. Adding dry powder straight to the yolk gives you grit.
- Combine a little at a time. Add the yolk mixture to the pigment paste gradually until it brushes well and dries without a sheen. Too much yolk gives a glossy, eventually cracking film. Too little and the paint dusts off when dry.
A safety note on dry pigment. Powdered pigments are the one real hazard here. Cadmiums, cobalts, chromates and lead white are toxic and the danger is inhaling airborne dust. Work in a ventilated space, wear a dust mask when handling powder, do not eat at the bench, and wet the pigment as soon as you reasonably can. Once it is a paste the risk drops sharply.
Two things it is not
It is not the tempera sold for schools. The poster paint labeled tempera in craft shops contains no egg. It is a cheap opaque water-based paint that stays soluble and is not intended to last. The shared name is a historical accident and causes constant confusion.
It is not a mural medium. Wall painting of the period is fresco, where pigment in water is applied into wet lime plaster and becomes part of the wall as it sets. Tempera can be used on a dry wall, but it is far less durable there and it is not what the great mural cycles are painted in.
Should you try it
If you like precision and patience, yes. It is inexpensive, the ingredients are a panel, some pigment and an egg, and the surface it gives is genuinely beautiful. What it will not do is let you blend, cover ground quickly, or forgive a change of mind, so it rewards a particular temperament.
For most people wanting to spend an evening painting rather than researching materials, acrylic is the practical medium, and our guide to the basics of acrylic painting covers it. If you want to understand the oil painting that displaced tempera, linseed oil in oil painting explains the binder that made it possible.
Ledgebay kits use acrylic rather than tempera, on pre-primed cotton canvas, rolled in a tube rather than folded, with vacuum-sealed paints and an 11 x 17 reference print. The catalog is here, and custom paint by numbers from a photo turns your own picture into a numbered canvas. One thing tempera's hatched technique has in common with a numbered kit is worth noticing: both build an image from many small deliberate marks, and both are absorbing for exactly that reason.
