Produzione di pigmenti pregiati in età imperiale: malattie “professionali” e maschere facciali

The numerous data offered by Pliny the Elder on the production and trade of minium-cinnabar and other refined pigments offer the starting point for reflections on economic, social and cultural history between the late Republican age and early Empire. In the first place, the reference to the societas, which in Rome had the monopoly of washing the precious pigment and which profited from its adulteration, lends itself to a fruitful comparison with other literary and epigraphic testimonies. Then, the news concerning the use of facial filter masks, made with bladders and intended to protect workers from the toxic fumes produced by minium-cinnabar, reveals the dependence on a passage from Pedanius Dioscorides’s De materia medica. Finally, the comparative analysis of the data relating to the value of individual pigments on the market confirms the very exceptional price of the minium as an ‘offscreen value’, so out of the ordinary as to be the only one subject to a legal limit.