Robyn Fraser

One of the most unsettling details in Mummy Brown  is not fiction at all. For several centuries, artists in Europe used a pigment known as “Mummy Brown.”  The name was not poetic exaggeration—it was literal. The pigment was originally made from ground-up Egyptian mummies , mixed with oils or resins to create a rich, translucent brown paint. The practice began as early as the 16th century. At the time, powdered mummy was already traded in Europe as a supposed medicinal substan