tempera

“But David,” I asked, “why black tempera paint? Not just on my face but in my ears and nose?”

The worthy effort to emphasize that much of the artist’s inventive genius — unfurling in thousands of manuscript pages, rather than oil paint and tempera — makes the dull staging a perhaps unavoidable conceit.

When Leonardo is an apprentice, painters in Italy use tempera: water plus color plus egg yolk.

It includes “The Ghost of a Flea,” Tate’s rarely loaned, murky miniature painting in dark tempera and gold on hardwood panel starring a monstrous, human-insect hybrid looking hungrily into a bucket of blood.

Call it the wailing of the banshees or whatever else you want, but Trump now seems the living embodiment of Edvard Munch's famous 1893 painting in oil tempera, pastel and crayon, "The Scream."