art history

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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is a type of paint made by mixing pigment with egg yolk.* This week I’ve been working on an egg tempera study (several figures copied from paintings by Fra Angelico), to use as a demo piece for the Renaissance painting workshop I’m doing at Wetcanvas and for an egg tempera class my wife and I will be teaching at a Society for Creative Anachronism event this Saturday.

I hadn’t done much tempera in the last year. I forgot what a beautiful medium it is. The painting process is to apply many fine hatching strokes with a dry brush, building up value slowly in a manner similar to working with a graphite pencil. The result is unlike any other medium. At first it’s frustrating, because I make a lot of little mistakes. Drat! I have too much paint on the brush. Akk! There’s still too much paint. Gah! I’m painting over an area that’s still wet and the paint is coming up. If you are trying to build tone, you gradually weave strokes back and forth, back and forth. You get into a kind of mental zone and suddenly it looks exactly right.

I need to do more tempera painting.

*If you are unfamiliar with painting media, please don’t confuse egg tempera with “tempera” poster paints for children. Other than being kinds of paint, they have nothing at all to do with each other.

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in my last post. I was grousing about artists who use high chroma colors indiscriminately. So I thought I’d provide an example of a good painting with lots of intense color.

This is the Doni Tondo by Michelangelo. Notice the bright colors in the drapery, which dominate the painting. Yet Michelangelo has carefully provided rests of dark dull colors and lighter tints. He uses chroma brilliantly.

So I don’t have a problem with high chroma, just clueless chroma.

It’s called the “Doni Tondo,” by the way, because it was commissioned for the daughter of a guy whose last name was Doni. A tondo, of course, is a round painting. It was painted circa 1506, when Michelangelo was 31 years old.

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was credited by the 16th century artist and biographer Vassari as the inventor of oil painting. That’s not the case, but in the early 15th century he was one of the pioneers of the modern use of oil painting as a primary painting medium.

Apparently, he had a sense of humor. This painting, which may be a self-portrait, was made with a frame carved as part of the panel. At the bottom, it’s inscribed (in Greek letters in the Flemish language) with what appears to be a pun. It can be read either as “As I can,” or “As Eyck can.”

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Traditional European heraldry (coats of arms) has a lot of rules regarding how designs can be constructed. One of the fundamental rules is this: no metal on metal or color on color. There are two metals: gold (represented as yellow) and silver (represented as white). All the other hues that can be used are “colors.” The rule is that colors can’t be placed next to other colors, only metals. Metals can’t be placed next to other metals, only colors.

This may seem like an antiquated piece of trivia, useful only to those who are desperate to be the fifth cousin twice removed of the Duke of Cornwall or somesuch, until you look at street signs. In the U.S. (and those parts of Europe and Canada I’ve visited) almost all street signs follow the heraldic metal on color and color on metal rule. A U.S. stop sign is a metal (white/argent) on a color (red/gules). Highway direction signs also (white/argent on green/vert). Speed limit signs? Black/sable on white/argent. Those few signs that don’t follow the heraldic convention, such as construction signs with black text on an orange field, are much less noticeable than the vast majority that do.

What’s going on here? Heraldry was originally designed so that painted shields and banners would be clearly visible at a great distance on the battlefield. For that to happen, you need to have a lot of contrast. As it turns out, with the pigments they had available, white and yellow had the best contrast against the other pigments. Thus the avoidance of color contrasted against color or metal contrasted against metal. Even with modern pigments and special reflective surface treatments, the rule pretty much holds up, so sign designers follow it even if they don’t know where it came from. Next time you’re on the road, try to find signs that break this rule. If you do find one, note that the contrast is poor compared to signs that follow the rule. Same with signs on buildings.

This rule can be useful when you are designing a color scheme and want to highlight a focal area of a painting. If you follow this old heraldic rule, you will have all the contrast you could need.

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are uncommon in Renaissance panel painting. Here is one exception, part of a series of three huge panels, done mostly in egg tempera, commemorating a minor Italian battle (the Battle of San Romano) by Paolo Uccelo. This one is in the National Gallery in London. I’ve seen it’s sister painting in the Louvre. One impressive aspect is the gilding. All of the armor is done in silver leaf, punched and scribed with three dimensional patterns of mail and plate, then glazed with thin layers of asphaltum ground in oil. Very impressive.

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by Fra Fillipo Lippi, tempera on panel, 95 × 62 cm (37 × 24” ). This gorgeous and delicate painting was done in 1465. Lippi was an interesting character, a Friar who had an affair with a nun. They were both allowed to resign from their respective orders. She bore him a son (Fillipino, who also became a painter) and a daughter (who was not artistically inclined, so far as I am aware).

For all that, his style is beautiful and, I think, possessed of a profound sense of the divine. He probably taught the more famous Sandro Botticelli, whose style is clearly influenced by him.

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