art history

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.

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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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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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.”

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 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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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. (CONTINUED) ⇒

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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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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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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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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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was 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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was one of the great realist painters of all time. Born in 1400, he was one of the pioneers of early oil painting in Northern Europe, along with his teacher Robert Campin and contemporary Jan van Eyck. Most of his career as a mature painter (he lived until 1464) was spent in Brussels. His work was renowned in his own time and when he visited Italy in 1450 he was welcomed, given several prominent commissions, and apparently asked to tutor Italian artists in the methods of Flemish oil painting. Despite his great influence on later artists, after his death his name fell into relative oblivion, and it was a matter of scholarship in later centuries to identify his (invariably unsigned) work, recognize his amazing skill at high realism, and clarify his role in the development of modern painting.

This painting, “Lady Wearing a Gauze Headdress,” was probably painted around 1445. It is thought by some to be a portrait of his wife, Elizabeth Goffaerts. This theory is given support by the (then quite unusual) direct gaze of the sitter and a slightly softer style than was usual for van der Weyden.

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Before the 19th century, painters didn’t have to worry about selecting a palette of paints from a huge array of those available. There were only a few pigments available, so painters had to make do with what they could get. If you wanted an opaque red, you had vermilion and, well, vermilion. So you learned how to get everything you could out of that pigment. You didn’t complain that it was a bit too orange for your taste, because your choices were vermilion and nothing. In addition, you had a couple of bright blues (both of which were incredibly expensive), a couple dull blues, a transparent violet-red, a green that had to be used carefully or it would turn black, an orange, a dull-ish yellow, one white, some variations on carbon black, and some earth colors. That’s mostly it, and you only had that many colors if you could afford them and lived someplace where there was enough trade to obtain them.

Go to a museum some time and look at some paintings from the Renaissance. Notice any absence of color? Dullness? Inability to obtain mixtures that convey a sense of reality? Muddiness? Poor color harmony? Unrealistic flesh tones? No? Many of those paintings were done with six or seven total pigments. Not pigments carefully selected to create an optimal palette from among hundreds of colors available in in an art store, but six or seven pigments selected from maybe ten or twelve that the artist could get. And yet they made some of the most gorgeous paintings ever created.

If you like the way paintings from before 1800 look, one option is to select a palette of colors that replicates those available then. So here is a simple palette that is similar to what was available in Western Europe before the new synthetic pigments began to be discovered in the late 1700’s. (CONTINUED) ⇒

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In the excellent Giotto to Durer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery, there is a description of the painting technique Leonardo used for most of his later work, including the Mona Lisa. This technique, which he called sfumato (“smoke-like”), creates a sense of three-dimensional light and shade that is different from that of his contemporaries.

I have seen references that said that the sfumato technique was simply to blend with the fingers. Leonardo certainly did that, but you can find fingerprints in oil paintings from before his birth, so finger painting is hardly unique to his style. Instead, it is based on his observations of smoke. He noted that smoke. which is semi-opaque, looks white against a dark background and dark against a light background. So he decided to make use of the optical properties of lead white paint in a similar manner. He would begin by applying a very dark underpainting in black, earth tones, and possibly a transparent bituminous brown. This underpainting was rather loose and thin, probably diluted with naphtha or oil of spike lavender (almost no other 15th century painters appear to have used solvents for painting, so Leonardo is probably the inventor of the washy underpainting). He would then apply velaturas over the dark underpainting in muted colors mixed with white. The method produces smoky, opalescent transitions from dark to light that are quite beautiful and quite unlike other painting in that period.

By the way, I want this Leonardo t-shirt.

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