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Guest Post: The Importance of Depth and Linear Perspective

9 May 2009 in art history, art technique by David | No comments

The van­ish­ing point has always held a cer­tain mys­tique about it to art his­to­ri­ans and art con­nois­seurs alike. The cre­ation of spe­cific van­ish­ing points in the early Renais­sance was a turn­ing point in the art world, and led to cement the depth in many paint­ings of this time period. Before this point, most artists used skenographia on stage in order to give it more depth, with the artist Giotto even attempt­ing a math­e­mat­i­cal cal­cu­la­tion to deter­mine points of dis­tance within art.

Brunelleschi was the first Renais­sance artist to use the van­ish­ing point and depth per­cep­tion dur­ing this time period. Brunelleschi addi­tion­ally noticed that when draw­ing Flo­ren­tine build­ings, all lines con­verged at the hori­zon line, there­fore lead­ing to the real­iza­tion of the van­ish­ing point. Other artists such as Donatello and Perug­ino helped to fur­ther cement the impor­tance of depth dur­ing this time, cul­mi­nat­ing in Da Vinci’s Last Sup­per; never before had there been a paint­ing with such math­e­mat­i­cal accu­racy in rela­tion to depth per­cep­tion and lin­ear for­ma­tion. The real­iza­tion of lin­ear per­spec­tive and the van­ish­ing point was kept within Italy for years before flour­ish­ing through­out the rest of Europe.

The checker­board floor pat­tern is one of the most obvi­ous exam­ples of orig­i­nal per­spec­tive. Alberti was one of the first artists to rec­og­nize this phe­nom­e­non, and named it as the “pave­ment” con­struc­tion, as it typ­i­cally led to the addi­tion of a pave­ment scene. He later wrote a trea­tise enti­tle “De Pictura/Della Pit­tura” explain­ing the proper meth­ods of per­spec­tive paint­ing. His the­o­ries were based more on pla­nar pro­jec­tions and cal­cu­la­tions using the height of tri­an­gles in the dis­tance, and also using pre­vi­ous math­e­mat­i­cal con­cepts from Euclid.

The van­ish­ing point and depth per­cep­tion are con­cepts which we take for granted today because we have never known an art world with­out them; how­ever, if you tra­verse through the ages, you will see pieces from the Mid­dle Ages where the baby Jesus appears to be the same size as Mary because the artists had no way in which to sig­nify per­spec­tive. It is amaz­ing to view in art muse­ums this sub­tle change in tech­nique; many muse­ums have paint­ings set up in chrono­log­i­cal order, or at least by major move­ments. The Renais­sance was truly its own move­ment within the art world, and sym­bol­ized a shift away from the chaotic, extremely fanat­i­cal world of the Mid­dle Ages.

With­out this kind of rev­o­lu­tion within the art world, we would still be look­ing at one-dimensional art works, lack­ing a proper depth per­cep­tion. This would prove to be a com­pletely dif­fer­ent world from the one we know now, per­haps even lack­ing the fun­da­men­tals of tele­vi­sion and movies. With­out depth in art, that could not have trans­lated over into any other medium. There­fore, we owe a great deal to these post-Medieval artists who truly paved the way for mod­ern art and art move­ments. Picasso would not have been able to exist with­out his acute under­stand­ing of the many lay­ers of depth and per­spec­tive, and we there­fore would have missed out on abstract art entirely as well as every sub­se­quent mod­ern art movement.

This post was con­tributed by Heidi Tay­lor, who writes about the online schools. She wel­comes your feed­back at HeidiLTaylor006 at gmail​.com.

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Vision of a Knight

24 October 2008 in David's work, art history, artists, oil painting, painting, tempera by David | No comments

"Vision of a Knight" (after Raphael)

I did this a cou­ple of years ago. It’s a copy of a small panel paint­ing by Raphael (6.7 × 6.7 inches) at the orig­i­nal size. Wikipedia says this about it (the orig­i­nal, of course):

The Vision of a Knight or The Dream of Sci­pio or Alle­gory is a small egg tem­pera paint­ing on poplar by the Ital­ian Renais­sance artist Raphael, fin­ished in 1504. It is in the National Gallery in Lon­don. It prob­a­bly formed a pair with the Three Graces panel, also 17 cm square, now in the Château de Chan­tilly museum.

The theme is con­tro­ver­sial. Some author­i­ties intend the sleep­ing knight to rep­re­sent the Roman gen­eral Sci­pio Africanus (236–184 BC) who was dream­ing to choose between Virtue (behind whom is a steep and rocky path) and Plea­sure (in looser robes). How­ever, the two fem­i­nine fig­ures are not pre­sented as con­tes­tants. They may rep­re­sent the ideal attrib­utes of the knight: the book, sword and flower which they hold sug­gest the ideals of scholar, sol­dier and lover which a knight should combine.

I did it in egg tem­pera with oil glazes. More recent analy­sis by the National Gallery indi­cates that the orig­i­nal was actu­ally an oil paint­ing. Although it is by no means a per­fect copy, I am mostly sat­is­fied, as I think I man­aged to cap­ture some por­tion of the sweet­ness of Raphael’s early work.

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Repost: Archival Permanence

13 October 2008 in art history, art materials, art technique, oil painting by David | No comments

First pub­lished 20 Octo­ber 2006.

Over time, all paint­ings dete­ri­o­rate. Badly made paint­ings dete­ri­o­rate quickly, some­times within a year or two of com­ple­tion. A paint­ing made with a high level of crafts­man­ship can last for many years before notice­able changes occur.

For most of us, it isn’t worth going to extreme lengths to make our paint­ings as per­ma­nent as they can pos­si­bly be. You could, for exam­ple, choose to paint on high-tech alu­minum hon­ey­comb pan­els. These are light, long-lasting, and much bet­ter sup­ports for paint­ing than most of those used by artists, because they don’t sig­nif­i­cantly expand or con­tract with changes in tem­per­a­ture and humid­ity. They also cost hun­dreds or thou­sands of dol­lars. If you know that you are a vision­ary artist who will be pro­duc­ing work of breath­tak­ing mag­nif­i­cence that will be of incred­i­ble his­toric sig­nif­i­cance, you owe it to future gen­er­a­tions to eat only cheap prepack­aged noo­dle dishes at each meal so that you can afford to paint on the most per­ma­nent and expen­sive sup­ports (until you work starts to sell for many thou­sands of dollars—then, go ahead and treat your­self to a nice juicy tofu burger).

Read the rest of this entry »

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The damage done by incompetent bureaucracy at Lascaux

6 July 2008 in art history by David | No comments

Some of the best paint­ings in the world were made long before the begin­ning of recorded his­tory. Not all pre­his­toric art is great, but some of it is as bril­liant and evoca­tive as any art from any era. The cave art at Las­caux is an par­tic­u­larly inspired example.

Over at his excel­lent Illus­tra­tion Art blog, David Apatoff has a post—“Lunatics and Bureau­crats”—about var­i­ous ways in which peo­ple dam­age art. One of his exam­ples is the dam­age the French gov­ern­ment has done to the images at Las­caux via an ill-planned air con­di­tion­ing sys­tem and var­i­ous attempts to fix it while cov­er­ing their asses from any assess­ment of blame.

A per­son named Lau­rence Beasley runs an orga­ni­za­tion devoted to sav­ing what can be saved at Las­caux. I would strongly rec­om­mend that you sign the peti­tion, or even donate some cash, to sup­port her cause.

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Question about panels

23 June 2008 in art history, art materials by David | No comments

On the Q&A page, Bethan writes,

I am inter­ested in the var­i­ous sub­strates used by 15-16th cen­tury painters– specif­i­cally wood. Which species of wood was com­monly used and how were the pan­els con­structed? I am assum­ing they had to be con­structed very well in order to have lasted cen­turies with­out warp­ing– a prob­lem I am cur­rently hav­ing. I am using birch ply­wood with Gamblin’s Tra­di­tional Gesso.

Bethan,

In the 15th and 16th cen­turies, artists typ­i­cally used a local wood cut with the grain from the cen­ter of large trees. That kind of panel is hard to get these days. Ital­ians liked woods such as poplar, cut­ting pan­els thick (up to an inch). North­ern Euro­peans liked harder woods such as oak, which was usu­ally cut thinner.

Pan­els were typ­i­cally cut and planed to size, then sea­soned for a year or more in the stu­dio, with addi­tional plan­ing as needed as sea­son­ing pro­gressed. Mod­ern authors often sug­gest find­ing sea­soned high qual­ity wood from old fur­ni­ture or doors that might oth­er­wise be discarded.

Warp­ing is com­mon with tra­di­tional gesso, since hide glue is very strong (stronger than most mod­ern glues). I usu­ally apply sev­eral coats of hide glue to the back of a panel to coun­ter­act the stress on the front. You can also gesso both sides equally. Some artists glue braces to the back of their pan­els, but that itself can cause prob­lems. A car­pen­ter can also con­struct a cra­dle using slid­ing dove­tail joins which place less stress on the panel. You can find exam­ples at www​.realgesso​.com.

I have found that birch ply­wood varies con­sid­er­ably in qual­ity. It best to use furniture-grade or marine grade ply­wood rather than the stuff you find in any given home sup­ply store. I also paint on tem­pered pressed wood pan­els (hard­board). These have been used since the early 20th cen­tury with mixed results. They are made dif­fer­ently now than they used to be, and the qual­ity is vari­able. With care, it seems to work rea­son­ably well.

Of course, the best panel mate­r­ial is high-grade alu­minum hon­ey­comb, but that’s incred­i­bly expen­sive and hard to find.

Good luck!

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Another tempera grassa recipe

10 June 2008 in art books, art history, art materials, art technique, artists, oil painting, painting, tempera by David | 1 comment

Those who’ve been read­ing here for awhile or have delved into the archives know that I’ve some­times exper­i­mented with a tra­di­tional paint­ing medium called tem­pera grassa. TG was most com­monly used in the 15th and 16th cen­turies; it rep­re­sents a tran­si­tional medium between egg tem­pera and true oil paint­ing. TG con­sists of pig­ment mixed with an emul­sion of egg and oil. Since the 16th cen­tury, TG has been fairly obscure—the best recent exam­ple would be the 20th cen­tury Ital­ian mas­ter, Pietro Annigoni.

In the 19th cen­tury (espe­cially in Ger­many), paint­ing recipes were devel­oped that involved var­i­ous com­bi­na­tions of tem­pera ingre­di­ents, often includ­ing some com­bi­na­tion of egg white, whole egg, lin­seed oil, stand oil, dammar var­nish, stand oil, and tur­pen­tine. You can find many such recipes on the inter­net with a few sim­ple Google searches. I’ve usu­ally avoided these rel­a­tively com­plex recipes in favor of sim­ple emul­sions of egg yolk (the tra­di­tional binder for egg tem­pera) and lin­seed or wal­nut oil, mixed with pigment/water paste.

Recently, I ran across a web reprint of Egg Tem­pera Paint­ing, Tem­pera Under­paint­ing, Oil Emul­sion Paint­ing: A Man­ual of Tech­nique, by Vaclav Vit­la­cyl and Rupert David­son Turn­bull. Pub­lished in 1935, it is a com­pendium of var­i­ous tem­pera tech­niques. One that caught my eye is a recipe they call “putrido.” Putrido is one name for tem­pera grassa (because it starts to smell bad after a few days). They say that this is based on a recipe from an old man­u­script found in Venice. For all I know it’s what was used in the Renaissance.

Take what­ever quan­tity of dry color you wish to pre­pare. Divide it into two equal parts. Rub up one part with yolk of egg only into a fairly stiff paste. Rub up the other part with sun-bleached lin­seed oil, to about the con­sis­tency of ordi­nary tube colours. (To save time or trou­ble, it is pos­si­ble to use ordi­nary tube oil colours, but to be sure of your ingre­di­ents, it is always advis­able to grind your own colour in oil.) The part that is rubbed up with oil may be slightly larger in quan­tity than the part rubbed with yolk of egg. Then take the two parts so pre­pared and grind them together, prefer­ably on the mar­ble slab. It will be found that when these two parts are put together, the resul­tant mix­ture will stiffen at once into a very stiff paste, too stiff to be eas­ily rubbed. This may be soft­ened down by the addi­tion of either water, emul­sion, or lin­seed oil. If you wish to use the Putrido in its leaner form, add either water or the emul­sion (Medium Fat Emul­sion), but if you wish to paint with it as an oil paint using oil as the medium, then thin it down with oil. In either case, add the water, the emul­sion, or the oil very slowly, only a few drops at a time, until the paste becomes a smooth cream eas­ily han­dled on the mar­ble slab.

I find this to be pretty inter­est­ing. It is a recipe that is sim­i­lar to what I’ve done before, is sim­ple to make, doesn’t involve sol­vents, and uses egg yolk (rather than the white or the whole egg), with which I am more famil­iar. They sug­gest that adding a small amount of oil of clove will pre­serve the paint mix­ture and allow it to be kept for some time (although not indef­i­nitely). I expect that stor­ing them in a refrig­er­a­tor, espe­cially in warm weather, would be a good idea. The oil of clove would also act as a retarder for the oil com­po­nent of the paint, caus­ing to dry more slowly. That could be a good or a bad thing, but I expect one would have to wait between lay­ers for the paint to dry. You could try to bal­ance the retard­ing effect of the clove oil by adding a small amount of lead napthen­ate, but that makes for a more com­plex reac­tion than I am really com­fort­able with.

I’ll have to try this recipe soon. I have a large paint­ing that I started in tem­pera and then stopped work on. It might make an excel­lent under­paint­ing for this TG recipe.

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A portrait by Memling

5 April 2008 in art history, artists by David | No comments

Hans Mem­ling (ca. 1440–1494) was one of the great por­traitists of the 15th cen­tury. Clearly influ­enced by the pio­neer­ing Nether­lan­dish oil painters from the ear­lier part of the century—Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyen—Memling con­cen­trated on for­mal ren­der­ing of detail. This one is “Por­trait of a Young Man,” ca. 185–90, oil on panel, 11.5 × 8.7”. Although there is rel­a­tively lit­tle form mod­el­ing of flesh tones, you still get a sense of per­son­al­ity and “aliveness.”

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On the reading list

17 February 2008 in art books, art history, drawing by David | No comments

Draw­ing in Early Renais­sance Italy: Revised Edi­tion by Fran­cis Ames-Lewis. It’s a good sum­mary of draw­ing in the period. Lots of illus­tra­tions, a good sum­mary of period draw­ing mate­ri­als and meth­ods, and an exten­sive dis­cus­sion of how the prac­tice of draw­ing evolved in Italy in the period lead­ing up to the High Renaissance.

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Sanguine

10 February 2008 in art history, art materials, drawing by David | No comments

San­guine is a hematite chalk used in Renais­sance draw­ing. Michaelangelo’s prepara­tory draw­ings in san­guine are stunning.

Over at Lines and Col­ors, there’s a post on san­guine draw­ing. There’s also a link to this brief tutorial.

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Behold the Man

30 July 2007 in art history, artists by David | 4 comments

I didn’t see the Mel Gib­son movie, “The Pas­sion of the Christ.” I was dis­ap­pointed, how­ever, by a small moment in the pre­view. The mak­ers made a big point of hav­ing the movie be in the orig­i­nal Latin and Ara­maic. When Pon­tius Pilate parades the tor­tured Jesus before the Jew­ish crowds, he says, “ecce homo,” which means, “behold the man.” He is attempt­ing to demon­strate to the potentially-rebellious Jews that Jesus is no divine Mes­siah, only a mor­tal man who can bleed, suf­fer, and be made to sub­mit to Roman author­ity like any­one else.

My pedan­tic quib­ble is this: Pilate pro­nounces “ecce” wrong. He says, “eche.” I’m no Latin scholar, but it is my under­stand­ing that there are no soft “C” sounds in clas­si­cal Latin. It should be pro­nounced “eke,” just as Cae­sar would have been pro­nounced “kaisar,” not “seesar” the way we say it today. The soft “C” pro­nun­ci­a­tion is from Medieval Church Latin, which did not exist circa 33 A.D. Any real schol­ars should feel free to cor­rect me on this. Read the rest of this entry »

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History of the frame

28 May 2007 in art history by David | 1 comment

At this site. Judg­ing from some of the badly-framed work I some­times see in gal­leries, some artists and gallery own­ers don’t real­ize how impor­tant good fram­ing is.

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Details of a Van Eyck painting

15 April 2007 in art history, artists by David | 2 comments

Check out these details of “The Madonna and Can­non Van Der Paele” by Jan Van Ecyk. What’s par­tic­u­larly amaz­ing to con­sider is how new this “Ars Nova” move­ment was when Van Eyck was paint­ing. Almost no one had done any­thing like it before. And yet Van Eyck’s work is so stun­ningly fluent.

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Art books I’m reading

24 February 2007 in art books, art history by David | No comments

From Flan­ders to Flo­rence: The Impact of Nether­lan­dish Paint­ing, 1400–1500 This is a book on the influ­ence of the Nether­lan­dish “Ars Nova” move­ment on Flo­ren­tine art. In the early 15th cen­tury, a new style of art, using new com­po­si­tional devices, new themes, new vir­tu­oso ren­der­ing meth­ods, and a new use of an old medium (oil paint) began to dom­i­nate paint­ing in the Nether­lands. Within a decade or so, artists such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Wey­den came to be well-known and highly regarded in Italy, includ­ing the city of Flo­rence, which was at that time a great cen­ter of Renais­sance paint­ing. Locally-produced paint­ings in the Nether­lan­dish style soon became pop­u­lar and, over the next decades, many painters began to excel at this new style of work. This is a big book, full of won­der­ful illus­tra­tions, that exam­ines this phe­nom­e­non in great detail.

Art in the Mak­ing: Rem­brandt I don’t know enough about 17th cen­tury paint­ing, so I blew a cou­ple of Bor­ders gift cards left over from Christ­mas on this book. It’s a detailed tech­ni­cal analy­sis of paint­ings by Rem­brandt (and fol­low­ers) in the National Gallery in Lon­don. I just got it, but it seems quite good so far. The folks at the National Gallery seem to really know their stuff; I’ve very much enjoyed two of their other books in the “Art in the Mak­ing” series. The other major book on the sub­ject (in Eng­lish) is Rem­brandt: The Painter at Work, which I have not read.

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Disegno and colore

9 January 2007 in art history, painting by David | No comments

His­tor­i­cally, two of the impor­tant words that Ital­ians used to describe the act of paint­ing were “dis­egno” and “col­ore.” As I under­stand them, the words had broad mean­ings that I’d like to dis­cuss a bit.

Dis­egno meant both “design” and “draw­ing.” It referred to the whole process of plan­ning and lay­ing out a paint­ing, up to and includ­ing any under­draw­ing. It also referred to what we think of as draw­ing, inde­pen­dent from painting.

Col­ore meant both “color” and the process of apply­ing paint. It included select­ing which col­ors would be used where, lay­er­ing paint, blend­ing paint, shad­ing, brush strokes, and so on.

I absolutely love how these words bring together con­cepts that are sep­a­rate in Eng­lish. If in paint­ing I make a mis­take in place­ment, I might say that I made a “draw­ing” error. But unless I did an actual under­draw­ing that doesn’t quite make sense. In Ital­ian, how­ever, it is exactly cor­rect to say that the dis­egno was not right. It’s also great to have a word for the appli­ca­tion of paint and its rela­tion­ship to color. One can say that, in his later life, Tit­ian paid less atten­tion to dis­egno than he had pre­vi­ously and put most of his empha­sis on col­ore. Impres­sion­ism is all about col­ore and less about dis­egno. In the 15th cen­tury, Nether­lan­dish paint­ing impressed Ital­ians with their colore—their won­der­ful and pre­cise appli­ca­tion of paint. These words just make incred­i­ble sense to me.

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Jan Gossaert

24 December 2006 in art history, artists by David | No comments

Danawas one of the great North­ern painters of the late Renais­sance. Gos­saert was born about 1478 and died in 1532. He was also called Jan Mabuse and Jen­nyn Van Hene­gouwe. In 1508 he trav­eled with his patron Phillip of Bur­gundy to Italy. His mature style became a bril­liant syn­the­sis of tra­di­tional Flem­ish tight real­ism, Ital­ian Renais­sance styles, and the inno­va­tions of Albrect Dürer. He was one of the first North­ern artist to paint large-scale sec­u­lar nudes as dec­o­ra­tion for an Italian-style palace for his human­ist mas­ter Phillip.

This paint­ing is his last. It depicts Danaë as she is approached by Zeus as a beam of sun­light, just before the god impreg­nates her with the hero Perseus (Greek myths are like that). The sub­ject was also painted by Tit­ian and Rem­brandt, but I am par­tic­u­larly fond of Gossaert’s version.

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