Some of the oldest civilizations like the Roman, Greek, and Egyptian used painting techniques quite a bit. These civilizations used mixtures made from mineral pigments mixed in bee wax and tempera. Although the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans knew about vegetable oils, there is no evidence of them having used it painting. However, they did use tempera, which is a fluid made from an organic binder, water and essential oils from vegetables. The organic binders used by Italians were primarily derived from animal sources like whole eggs, milk and animal glue.

However, from the end of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance in the 15th century, this ancient technique of painting was more or less lost. Instead, artists used oil painting and tempera. In Italy and Greece, olive oil was used to make mixtures from pigments. However, this mixture took a long time to dry. As a result, in the 12 century, it led a German monk named Theophilus to warn painters against the use of paint made from olive oil. In the 5th century, a medical writer named Aetius Arnideus mentions the use of drying oil like varnish on paintings in his writings. In the 8th century, Perilla oil was used in Japan after lead was added to it. While in the 14th century, Cennino Cennini was instrumental in showing a technique where tempera painting was covered by a light layer of oil.

In the book entitled Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari published in 1550, it was mentioned that the oil painting technique that is used today (with slight modifications of course) was invested by Jan van Eyck, a Flemish painter, around 1410. It is believed that van Eyck was the first painter to use oil paint in which linseed oil was used as binder for the pigments derived from minerals. His technique of using oil paints revolutionized the world of painting. The paintings ended up being more brilliant and translucent with a high intensity of color. This gave the paintings an enameled look, which is visible even today in van Eyck's paintings.

Then Antonello da Messina was instrumental in introducing a new technical improvement to oil paintings. He used lead oxide in the mixture of pigment and oil to help enhance the drying property of the paint.

After that came Leonardo da Vinci, who cooked the pigment oil mixture at low temperatures after adding bee wax to it. This prevented the resultant mixture from getting a dark color.

The Italians artists were instrumental in modifying the original oil paint recipe, but they managed to keep it a secret for nearly three centuries. This would explain why the Italian artists reined over entire Europe with their brilliance and artistry.

In 1600, Rubens moved to Italy and lived there for 9 years. He took to studying the painting medium used in Italy and then made his own improvements to it. Thereafter, every generation of painters has made its own improvement in the painting medium, and today vegetal and non-edible oils are used in paints to help the paint dry faster. The oils most commonly used are tung oil, oiticica oil, perilla oil, poppyseed oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, dehydrated castor oil and numerous fish oils. Today, iodine number is used to classify drying oils, with iodine number more that 130 is considered to be a drying oil, between 130 and 115 as semi drying, and less than 115 as non-drying.