New isn’t always better. In the 15th century paint evolved from an egg tempera to oil based. The benefits of oil based were obvious (brighter, smoother, etc) but there were still advantages to the old paints. Research is showing that some renaissance masters found their own ways to incorporate egg.
From Open Culture:
In practice, Renaissance painters seem to have experimented with different proportions of oil and egg, and so discovered that each had its own strengths for rendering different elements of an image. Hyperallergic’s Taylor Michael writes that in The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, seen up top, “Botticelli painted Christ, Mary Magdalene, and the Virgin, among others, with tempera, and the background stone and foregrounding grass with oil.” Thanks to the oxidization-slowing effects of phospholipids and antioxidants in the yolk — as scientific research has since proven — they’ve all come through the past five centuries looking hardly worse for wear.
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