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Either painting is a fullydeveloped technique, replete with recipes, thick instructionalvolumes, and generations of accumulated wisdom, or else it is atrackless scene of perpetual isolated reinvention. History favorsthe first view. In classical oil painting technique, first there is theblank panel, and then a succession of layers: a coat of size (glue)mixed with white (like chalk or marble dust), to make the canvasas brilliant as possible; then the imprimatura (underpainting)over the entire canvas; then the underdrawing; the grisaille (amonochrome version of the painting, in full detail); and finally thepainting itself succession of body colors, painted outlines,details, glazes, and varnish. Each of these has its own logic andits own rules. Late medieval tempera paintings like Sassetta involve even more layers At least a dozen from the raw panel tothe final coat. Each layer has to be sandedbefore the next is applied. Onlythen, after weeks of work, can the painting itself be started.Later, in the Renaissance, it became popular to give paintings asense of unified atmosphere by painting them with glazes, thinwashes of paint mixed with varnish. A golden glaze might helpbathe a scene in the glow of a sunset, and a bluish glaze couldturn a day scene into a nocturne. (Hollywood does the same withblue filters for night scenes.) Subtler glazes can blend individualleaves into masses, or help unify the loud colors of a rug so itlooks like a single piece of fabric. Titian is the most famous forglazes, although his predecessor Giovanni Bellini may have usedmore of them. Titian is supposed to have boasted that he usedthirty or forty glazes per painting, but glazes are so evanescentthat even modern conservators cannot decide on how many therewere.
A microscopic section through a Renaissance paintingreveals the astonishing patience that went into their makingNo twentieth-century painting would havea cross-section like this. The artist, Cima da Conegliano, has putdown a dark imprimatura and then at least thirteen layers ofyellows, browns, and Copper Resinate Green. Each layer isdifferent: some are fairly thick, and others, including the first one just above the dark imprimatura, are extremely thin. The sectionis magnified five hundred times, so all the layers put together arestill thinner than most modern paintings. The thinnest layers hereare almost entirely transparent, and even the thickest ones aretranslucent. Each one slightly modifies the overall color, like theeffect of looking through mylar sheets. There are limits to whatthin sections like this can tell conservators: they can’t sayanything about the paint structure an inch to either side, and theycan’t report reliably on the total number of glazes. Cima mighthave finished this portion of his painting with the thin surfaceglazes for which Titian is famous, but they might have been sothin, and so irregularly distributed over the surface, that they donot show up in this section at all.
Who was Cima de Conegliano? • Even in this early production Cima gave evidence of the serious calm, and almost passionless spirit that so eminently characterized him. Later he fell under the spell of the great Giovanni Bellini and became one of his ablest successors, forming a happy, if not indispensable link between this master and Titian. • At first his figures were somewhat crude, but they gradually lost their harshness and gained in grace while still preserving the dignity. In the background of his facile, harmonious compositions the mountains of his country are invested with new importance. Cima was one of the first Italians to assign a place for landscape depiction, and to formulate the laws of atmosphere and of the distribution of light and shade. His conceptions are usually calm and undramatic, and he has painted scarcely any scenes (having depicted religious ones almost exclusively) that are not suggestive of "sante conversazioni". But most of his paintings represent Madonnas enthroned among the elect, and in these subjects he observes a gently animated symmetry. The groupings of these sainted figures, even though they may not have a definitely pious character, and the impression of unspeakable peace.
Who was Titian? • Titian was an Italian painter, the leader of 16th-century Venetian school of the Italian Renaissance. He was born in the Republic of Venice. • Recognized by his contemporaries as "The Sun Amidst Small Stars" (recalling the famous final line of Dante's Paradiso), Titian was one of the most versatile of Italian painters, equally adept with portraits, landscape backgrounds, and mythological and religious subjects. His painting methods, particularly in the application and use of color, would exercise a profound influence not only on painters of the Italian Renaissance, but on future generations of Western art. • During the course of his long life Titian's artistic manner changed drastically but he retained a lifelong interest in color. Although his mature works may not contain the vivid, luminous tints of his early pieces, their loose brushwork and subtlety of polychromatic modulations are without precedent in the history of Western art.
Who was Giovanni Bellini? • Giovanni Bellini was an Italian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of Venetian painters. He is considered to have revolutionized Venetian painting, moving it towards a more sensuous and colouristic style. Through the use of clear, slow-drying oil paints, Giovanni created deep, rich tints and detailed shadings. His sumptuous coloring and fluent, atmospheric landscapes had a great effect on the Venetian painting school, especially on his pupils Giorgione and Titian • He lived to see his own school far outshine that of his rivals, the Vivarini of Murano; he embodied, with growing and maturing power, all the devotional gravity and much also of the worldly splendour of the Venice of his time; and he saw his influence propagated by a host of pupils, two of whom at least, Giorgione and Titian, equalled or even surpassed their master. Giorgione he outlived by five years; Titian, challenged him, claiming an equal place beside his teacher. • In the historical perspective, Bellini was essential to the development of the Italian Renaissance for his incorporation of aesthetics from Northern Europe. Significantly influenced by Antonello da Messina, who had spent time in Flanders, Bellini made prevalent both the use of oil painting, different from the tempera painting being used at the time by most Italian Renaissance painters, and the use of disguised symbolism integral to the Northern Renaissance. Bellini makes use of religious symbolism through natural elements, such as grapevines and rocks. Yet his most important contribution to art lies in his experimentation with the use of color and atmosphere in oil painting.
And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders and went backwards, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
You might think that with something as well-known as oilpainting, the techniques would all be written down, so thatanyone could study them and try to paint like Titian orRembrandt. But oil painting methods have always been semi-secret. Painters have gone to theirdeathbeds without telling their secrets, and when certain ways ofpainting went out of fashion, the methods tended to be forgottenalong with them. The result is that painting techniques have beenlost on at least three different occasions since the middle ages.The first loss was in the fifteenth century, when Jan Van Eyck’smethod. The envy of many painters, and the first successful oiltechnique was not passed on to enough people, and waseventually entirely forgotten. Then there was the loss of thefamous Venetian technique practiced by Titian, Giorgione,Veronese, and Cima: it died slowly over several generations aspainters used methods that were less and less like the originaltechniques. Eventually, when painters in the nineteenth centurywanted to paint in the Venetian manner, they found that therewas no one left to teach them and no books to consult. The thirdloss was the academic method developed mostly in the FrenchAcademy up to the time of the French Revolution. It was anelaborate, exacting technique, which had grown out of the lateRenaissance. But after the Revolution, when painters decidedthat the academies might not have been all that bad, it was toolate. In the twentieth century what goes under the name of oilpainting would not have been recognizable to painters from theRenaissance and Baroque. It is about as much like their paintingas the civilization in the Mad Max movies is to ours.
Jan van Eyck or Johannes de Eyck was a Flemish painter active in Bruges and considered one of the best Northern European painters of the 15th century. • There is a common misconception, which dates back to the sixteenth-century Vite of the Tuscan artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari, that Jan van Eyck invented oil painting. Oil painting as a technique for painting wood statues and other objects is much older, and Theophilus (Roger of Helmarshausen?) clearly gives instructions for oil-based painting in his treatise, On Divers Arts, written in 1125. It is however true that the van Eyck brothers were among the earliest Early Netherlandish painters to use it for very detailed panel paintings, and that they achieved new and remarkable effects through the use of glazes, wet-on-wet and other techniques.Thus, because of his early mastery of the technique, he was traditionally known as the "father of oil painting."
Today only the idea of classical layering remains. In the 1956 film, The Mystery of Picasso, recordsPicasso showing off for the camera, repeatedly destroying andrecreating his images. He was not layering in the older fashion,since he covered over his mistakes with opaque paint instead oftranslucent veils; but he was layering in a temporal sense,because the finished painting rested on the layered memory ofdiscarded ideas. Steps, layers, preparation, and planning can becomponents of the concept of painting even when they areabsent from its practice.
Max Doerner, one of the mostcareful students of Old Masters technique, reports that hisstudents made perfect replicas of a painting by El Grecofollowing these eleven steps: • (1) Begin with a uniform white, • (2) Then add a "luminous brown imprimatura, with nowhite in it. The imprimatura may be a glaze, thinned withmastic, or egg tempera, which must then be varnished so itcan support layers of oil paint. • (3) On top of that, make the drawing, either in tempera ordirectly on the imprimatura in white chalk. • (4) Paint white into the existing dark, using a whitetempera composed of egg yolk, white lead, and oil. Beginwith the sharpest highlights and spread out, scumbling, insemi-opaque layers" into all the light areas, creatingpassages where the dark imprimatura shows through inoptical greys (that is, tones that are the product of severaltranslucent layers, like plastic sheets, seen all at once). Atthis point, the picture as a whole should be much lighterthan the original. • (5) Give the entire painting a "light intermediate varnish,"and then • (6) Set the local colors with large brushes, making surethey are all lighter than the original. • (7) "Easily and deftly" draw contours into them, and"refine" them with loose reflected lights. • (8) If the colors become as dark as the original, they arefinished; but in general, maintain lighter tones than theoriginal painting. • (9) Next deepen the shadows, and • (10) Let the painting dry. Finish with an overall glaze • (11) Over the glaze, paint in the "strong accents" of lightand dark.
Who was El Greco? • El Greco was born in Crete, which was at that time part of the Republic of Venice, and the centre of Post-Byzantine art. In 1570 he moved to Rome, where he opened a workshop and executed a series of works. During his stay in Italy, El Greco enriched his style with elements of Mannerism and of the Venetian Renaissance. • El Greco's dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but found appreciation in the 20th century. El Greco is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism. El Greco has been characterized by modern scholars as an artist so individual that he belongs to no conventional school. He is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical pigmentation, marrying Byzantine traditions with those of Western painting. • El Greco was disdained by the immediate generations after his death because his work was opposed in many respects to the principles of the early baroque style which came to the fore near the beginning of the 17th century and soon supplanted the last surviving traits of the 16th-century Mannerism. El Greco was deemed incomprehensible and had no important followers.
When painting is effectively done without separate steps Asvirtually all modern painting is, beginning with theImpressionists then there is very little that can be said about itsmethod. The unease that many parents feel when their childrenset out to study art is partly because they sense that there is nosystematic technical instruction in contemporary art schools. In alarge sense, that is correct because there is no longer a successionof definite kinds of information that must be learned in a certainorder. Painting might take years of preparation and experience,but a truly great painting might also happen in a few minutes ofintense work. Artists first became aware of this around the turn ofthe century, and Whistler is the one who made it famous byproclaiming that his patrons paid for the lifetime of experiencethat went into the painting, not the half hour it took to paint it. Inthe same vein the German Impressionist Max Liebermann said,“there is no Technique. There are as many techniques as there arepainters.”
The new alla prima methods, wherethe paint goes onto the canvas all at once, open a tremendousrange of possibilities for painting that never existed before. Butthey also create a fundamental anxiety that has accompaniedmodernism since the final decay of the academies at the end of thenineteenth century: it is no longer clear that painting issomething that requires a body of knowledge, that can be learnedand studied. It may be stepless, beyond the reach of any routineeducation. Painting and alchemy are arts, backed by massiveliteratures on technique and tradition, but they feel like theymight collapse at any moment into ruleless experience
