Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/Encaustica

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rich, Anthony (1849). The illustrated companion to the Latin dictionary, and Greek lexicon. p. vi. OCLC 894670115. https://archive.org/details/illustratedcompa00rich. 

ENCAUS'TICA (ἐγκαυστική). The art of encaustic painting; i. e. in colours mixed with wax, and afterwards hardened by the action of fire. This art, as practised by the ancients, is now lost, nor has the process actually adopted by them ever been thoroughly ascertained; although the Count Caylus imagined that he had discovered the secret, and wrote an express treatise on the subject. They appear to have pursued several methods, and to have conducted the operation in very different ways: either with colours mixed with wax, laid on with a dry brush, and then burnt in with a cautery (cauterium); or by marking out the drawing with a hot etching iron (cestrum) upon ivory, in which process wax does not appear to have been used at all; or, lastly, by liquifying the wax with which the colours were mixed, so that the brush was dipped into the liquid compound, and the colour laid on in a fluid state, as it is with water colours, but subsequently smoothed and blended by the operation of heat. Plin. H. N. xxxv. 41. Ib. 39. Vitruv. vii. 9. Ov. Fast. iii. 831.