Renaissance layering

When you walk down a museum hall full of Renais­sance paint­ings, you can eas­ily pick out the Ital­ian paint­ings from the Nether­lan­dish paint­ings at a glance. While the sub­ject mat­ter is sim­i­lar (mostly scenes from the New Tes­ta­ment), and the pig­ments are basi­cally the same, they used color in com­pletely dif­fer­ent ways. I’ve come to real­ize that the dif­fer­ence largely comes down to how lay­er­ing was done.

By lay­er­ing, I mean vari­a­tions on glaz­ing. I am using that term broadly to mean any appli­ca­tion of two or more lay­ers in which the lay­ers beneath con­tribute to the final visual effect. Glaz­ing can be done with rel­a­tively trans­par­ent col­ors such as red lake, or with opaque col­ors such as ver­mil­lion (if it is applied thinly enough). In both the Nether­lan­dish and Ital­ian tra­di­tions, glaz­ing was crit­i­cal to the final appear­ance of impor­tant parts of almost all paint­ings, but the way they used glaz­ing was different.

In Nether­lan­dish paint­ing, glaz­ing was used to adjust val­ues with min­i­mal loss of chroma. Typ­i­cally, an opaque color, such as ver­mil­lion, was applied first. The ini­tial layer was typ­i­cally flat—i.e., with no attempt to model the forms. Then a trans­par­ent pig­ment of sim­i­lar hue, such as red lake, was applied over the ini­tial flat layer. The trans­par­ent color was applied thinly in light areas and thickly in dark areas. Often mul­ti­ple lay­ers were applied to darks. Because thicker lay­ers of trans­par­ent pig­ments absorb more light than thin lay­ers, a thick layer is darker than a thin layer. This approach to mod­el­ing, in which darks are cre­ated not with darker col­ors, but with thicker, light-absorbing lay­ers, cre­ates an opti­cal effect that is com­pletely dif­fer­ent than sim­ply mix­ing a light, a mid­tone, a dark, and then blend­ing them. Blacks and other dark, dull col­ors were avoided in Nether­lan­dish glaz­ing. Fully-modeled objects have a jewel-like tonal­ity that jumps off the pic­ture. This glaz­ing tech­nique wasn’t used through­out the paint­ing, but was care­fully applied in order to con­trol the struc­ture of the com­po­si­tion. It was not used in mod­el­ing flesh tones, which were typ­i­cally done very thinly, in one or two layers.

In Ital­ian paint­ing, by con­trast, glaz­ing is used to gen­er­ate hues through opti­cal mix­ing of lay­ers. For exam­ple, in early Renais­sance Ital­ian tem­pera paint­ing, flesh tones are cre­ated by first apply­ing a layer of dull green, then mod­el­ing in a dark dull brown­ish green. On top of that, the flesh color is cre­ated by apply­ing an opaque pink (flake white mixed with ver­mil­lion) thinly enough that the under­paint­ing shows through. Later in the Renais­sance, when Nether­lan­dish oil paint­ings began to be imported, the Ital­ians tried to copy those effects in oil paint. But while they knew how to make oil paint, they didn’t know about Nether­lan­dish lay­er­ing. They cre­ated darks by mix­ing dark dull col­ors, includ­ing black. Ital­ian oil paint­ings from that period show none of the chroma inten­sity in the darks that make Nether­lan­dish paint­ings so spe­cial. It wasn’t that they were stu­pid; it was that they thought about color and lay­er­ing in a dif­fer­ent way, and that approach cre­ated a dif­fer­ent set of effects. The Ital­ian method was also use­ful. Bot­ti­celli, for exam­ple, under­painted foliage with black before glaz­ing over with greens. This makes the foliage fade into the back­ground. He under­painted flesh with yel­low ochre, to make flesh tones that had a warm cast. Michelan­gelo used a tra­di­tional (and then some­what old-fashioned) under­paint­ing with greeen earths for flesh tones. If he wanted two dif­fer­ent tones of blue drap­ery in a paint­ing, he would under­paint one with black, then ultra­ma­rine mixed with vary­ing amounts of white and black. The other would be done in the same set of ultra­ma­rine gra­da­tions over white gesso, cre­at­ing two com­pletely dif­fer­ent ranges of blue with the same sur­face pig­ment. Leonardo’s sfu­mato method involved a very dark under­paint­ing in dull earth tones, fol­lowed by glaz­ing with light col­ors mixed with a lot of white. Ital­ian paint­ing is gen­er­ally brighter and more chro­matic than Nether­lan­dish paint­ing, but the darks are more dull. The eye picks up on these dif­fer­ences very easily.

It’s use­ful to under­stand how both of these kinds of lay­er­ing effects are accom­plished, because if you know how to do both, you have a broad range of use­ful tricks.