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Attic ochre or attic yellow ocher () — the historically known variety of ochre, which had a bright lemon Yellow, was considered the best and most expensive type of ochre in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Attic ochre was used mainly for high-quality finishing work or decoration of household items. In painting, it was used to depict light, say, in contrast to achian ochre, which was used to paint . This variety was mined in the immediate vicinity of Athens, A. V. Winner. Oil painting materials (edited by Igor Grabar). — Мoskow: publishing house ″Art″, 1950. — 522 p. from the ore veins of the silver mines near Koliada (, Κωλιάδα άκρα), as well as in the Laurian silver mines. Tolstoy I. I. Hellenistic technique. Digest of articles. — 1st printing house of the Academician Publishing House. Sciences of the USSR in Leningrad, 1948. — 368 p.
Attica bright yellow clay was considered to be of particularly high quality; it was homogeneous, had no inclusions, and held the surface perfectly, even to the point of appearing a slight shine when smoothed, which made a favorable impression. Dioscorides in his treatise “On Medicinal Substances” recommended taking Attic ochre for medical use. Dioscorides. De materia medica: V, 93
Pliny the Elder fully confirms his opinion in Natural History (book thirty-three). “The best ochre is the one called Attic; its price is 2 denarii per pound. The next one is , the price is half that of the Attic one.” Pliny the Elder, Gaius. Natural History. About art: Book. 33-36; Per. from Latin, preface and note. G. A. Taronyan. — Мoskow: Scientific-ed. center ″Ladomir″, 1994. — 939 p.
The work of Polygnotus, which has been preserved more than others, allows us to judge the range of and with which he worked. His palette, however, like other artists of that time, was quite limited. It included white (melinium), yellow (atticum, Attic ochre), red (sinopis pontica) and black (atramentum) paints. Of course, one cannot understand the evidence of antiquity to mean that only four colors are found in the works of Polygnotus. The four pigments mentioned above, when mixed with each other in different proportions, result in more than eight hundred different shades. Boris Farmakovsky. Attic vase painting and its relationship to monumental art in the era immediately after the Greco-Persian wars. — St. Petersburg: printing house of I. N. Skorokhodov, 1902. — 616 p.
To this it should be added that in ancient times ochre remained the only or almost the only yellow pigment available. When composing yellow paint itself, ochre was often mixed with chalk or lime. A. M. Nikitin. Artistic paints and materials. Directory. — Moscow: Infra-Engineering, 2021.
The high cost and lack of Attic ochre forced us to look for recipes for simulating its color using artificial means. Thus, in the last, fourteenth chapter of the same book (“Paints replacing crimson, ochre, mountain green and indigo”), Vitruvius describes one of the methods used by house painters to obtain the color of Attic ochre from boiled dried violets and chalk.
Of the modern paints that are closer in tone to Attic ochre, one can name, first of all, golden ochre.
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