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.

I know, I know. Who cares? It just irritated me. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

What’s all this have to do with art? It’s only tangential. I’ve been thinking about and looking at Renaissance depictions of the adult Jesus lately. Artists were called upon to paint various moments from the life of Jesus. Artists at the time produced this kind of religious art for customers and patrons who paid for conventional work that reinforced the religious conventions of the time. They sometimes managed to transcend the limits of the marketplace, however, with original work that is profoundly moving.

Here I’ll compare a late 15th century German painter, Hieronymus Bosch, with that of the 16th century Italian, Caravaggio. I’m doing that simply because I find their religious work compelling, and because I can’t do justice to the full range of this kind of work in a blog post (it would take a very long book).

	Here, for example, is “Ecce Homo,” by Bosch, from about 1475–80.
	Here’s is another one of the same scene by Bosch from the 1490’s. I like the earlier one better.
	This is Bosch’s “Christ Carrying the Cross,” from about 1515–16. It seems more like the work he’s most famous for—chaotic paintings of hell. In this one, the composition is an almost random spread of grotesque figures surrounding Jesus as he is forced to bear the cross.
	And this is my favorite Bosch depiction of Jesus. It’s “Christ Mocked,” from about 1495–1500. In it, Christ stands patiently while a group of grotesque fools make fun of him. Using caricature freely, he creates a strong sense of humanity in the juxtaposition between Christ and the figures surrounding him.
	Here is an “Ecce Homo,” by Caravaggio from about 1606. Here he shows his typical mastery of composition, light, and darkness to create a dramatic and moving scene.
	This is Caravaggio’s “Taking of Christ,” from about 1598, in which the Romans are led to Jesus by the traitor Judas. Look at the way that the dramatic lighting is used to lead the eye across the composition from right to left—the opposite direction than we normally expect.
	But Caravaggio’s most moving depiction of the adult Christ is his amazing, “The Entombment,” from about 1602–1603. Caravaggio makes Christ into a mere corpse, without any of the traditional indicators of divinity such as a halo or crown of thorns. In doing so he emphasizes Jesus’s humanity and the genuine grief of the mourners. Once again, he leads the eye from right to left into an unusual, but effective, focal point.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

White: lead white was about it. If you want to simulate the color and opacity (not the handling properties) of lead white, mix titanium white and zinc white at about 50/50, then add a tiny touch of yellow ochre.

Black: usually bone black (now called “ivory” black), lamp black, or vine black.

Red: genuine vermilion, which you can simulate with cadmium red light. Red lake, which you can simulate with rose madder or alizarin crimson. Minium (red lead) which you can simulate with cadmium orange mixed with cadmium red light.

Blue: mineral ultramarine, which you can simulate with modern synthetic ultramarine (if you want to simulate cheaper grades of this incredibly expensive pigment, add some white and black). Azurite, which you can simulate with cobalt blue. Indigo, which you can simulate with Prussian blue mixed 50/50 with black.

Yellow: lead tin yellow, which you can simulate with a 50/50 mix of cadmium yellow light and yellow ochre. Later on, Naples yellow gradually replaced lead tin yellow. It is similar, but more like 2 parts cadmium yellow light to 3 parts yellow ochre.

Green: greens were usually mixed from ultramarine or azurite and lead tin yellow or Naples yellow. They also had copper green (used only sometimes, since it was known to turn brown unless isolated between layers of varnish), which can be simulated with viridian.

Violet: was usually mixed with red lake and a blue.

Orange: was usually mixed with vermilion and lead tin yellow or Naples yellow.

Earths: a wide range of earths were available, depending on where the artist lived. These included equivalents to modern raw sienna, burnt sienna, raw umber, burnt umber, yellow ochre, red ochre, green earth, black earth, brown earth. They also sometimes used malachite, which you can simulate with 1 part viridian to 5 parts white.

There were a few others used from time to time, but these were the common ones. Most artists didn’t use all of these.

Try using this palette for a few paintings. You’ll get a much better sense of how “Old Masters” did their color mixing.

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.

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.