Why a Study of Past Techniques?

The title of this guide is kind of playful. I would like to sketch out the evolution of Western painting techniques in the modern era starting with the Renaissance to the Nineteenth Century in this guide, with a brief account of Modernism. My purpose is to share my knowledge of past techniques to inform fellow contemporary artists or collectors who may be unfamiliar with the topic. I hope it will enrich one's appreciation of antique painting and perhaps open new avenues of experimentation to other artists. Conventional histories of painting techniques site the mid Eighteenth Century as a point of decline in good craftsmanship. Industries had developed to provide the individual artist with paints, brushes, and media and eventually replaced the workshop and guild system which had previously trained the artist to prepare his or her own materials. Connoisseurs had come to prize the works of "old masters" and encouraged artists to discover the lost "secrets" of previous generations. They often neglected the fact that technique and society had always evolved and changed in lock step, producing new works in new media created in a new language, not necessarily of lesser accomplishment than a Giotto fresco or a Mona Lisa. Still, I think it is important to be aware of the way materials effect how one works and the images one produces. A study of past approaches to art making enhances one's appreciation of both contemporary and classic art. This overview is by no means exhaustive or thorough, but meant to touch upon the main developments of painting technique in a general way.

Renaissance Innovation

It seems perhaps arbitrary to take up a trajectory of painting technique begining at the end of the Medieval era. After all, art had been produced since recorded history and the techniques changed as did the types of objects produced throughout that history. But our contemporary culture is based more or less on the language developed out of the Renaissance that marked the end of the middle ages, separating us from the lost civilization of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. The Renaissance in part recovered that civilization, but altered it. The result is our contemporary visual culture. Painting in the middle ages took many forms, but the picture making on canvas in oil so prevalent in our time did not exist. Painting on fabric in oil for banners in festivals, etc. was meant to be fugitive. Frescos or wall painting in colored lime stone was the most prevalent form along with miniatures in tempera for manuscript illustration. Both traditions were carried forth in the Renaissance, with the technique altering greatly for the later medium and hardly at all for the former. Fresco is a way to decorate walls. The wall is plastered with limestone and made moist with water then painted with more limestone tinted with pigment. The wall absorbs the pigment and dries, incorporated into the wall. The paint sometimes had linseed oil in it or glue. The miniatures in books were painted in tempera, which is pigment mixed with egg yolk. It is extremely durable when dry and can be mixed with water for greater facility. The books were created out of parchment, or lamb skin. The surface was prepared with gesso, a mixture of chalk and glue. The glue was also derived from boiling lamb skins or rabbit skins. This technique was also used to create wood panel paintings for churches and public buildings, the panels being sized first with the glue. Wood panels were prepared with the same gesso and painted with tempera. During the Renaissance, many new materials were produced in great abundance and made available all over Europe. They include highly refined and useful siccative oils such as walnut, poppy, and linseed oil, the most popular. Linseed oil was a big industry for the Netherlands. Renaissance artists began to introduce the oil into the tempera mixture to render it more flexible and reduce the drying time so it could be greater manipulated.The introduction of oil into tempera spawned new techniques such as glazing. Glazing is the application of a transparent color over a dry matte one. Jewel like effects are achieved and the color is greatly intensified. Panel paintings abound in the use of glazing by the late Fifteenth century. The oil provides transparency and great color saturation while the egg component, or tempera, enables the artist to produce very fine lines that do not bleed. This combination of opaque matte effects and transparent oil effects is the keystone of old master painting. Variations of this combination explains most effects achieved by the "old masters" and endured throughout the development of oil painting until the Nineteenth century. Most paintings in museums by the Northern European artists of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries are in fact not wholly tempera or wholly oil but a combination of the two. Panel painting with a mixed tempera technique did not allow for much improvisation. Tempera cannot be reworked and glazes had to be planned in advance. Therefore, the composition was worked out beforehand. The intended image and effect had to be known from the start. Also, a word about color. Pigments then, as today, were either inexpensive or costly depending on the color. The gap is less extreme today, but pigments derived from oxidixed earth such as burnt umber or raw sienna cost a lot less than the prized lapis lazuli, a blue derived from a semi-precious stone. This is why blue is used so sparingly in antique painting and explains the brown, amber quality of most antique painting. It was believed a picture should in general be composed of neutral tones provided by the earth colors with occasional accents of red, blue, and green. The glaze technique also required a base in light, almost monochromatic neutrals on which a brilliant, modulated glaze could sit. Some glazes were not red or green, but brown. A black and white picture was painted first upon which a brown glaze was applied. This created an incredible spectrum of tones. It still does if you try it. Upon this accents were laid out. Intense blues or greens were achieved by an under coat of pink or yellow respectively.

The Advent of Oil Painting on Canvas: The Venetian Revolution

About the late Fifteenth century, linen canvas became available in great quantities, again from the Netherlands. Textiles had always been painted on, but now the technique was perfected. In Venice, the greatest power in Europe (and the most cosmopolitan) at the time, artists had to decorate the new public and private buildings constructed everywhere. The wet climate of this northern Italian city did not lend itself to fresco. The walls were too humid. Panels were expensive, heavy, and laborious to prepare. Stretched canvas was developed. Canvas was pulled tight on a frame and sized with glue, then given a coat of lead white paint in oil. Lead white was, and is, a very useful pigment. It is very opaque and dries rapidly and creates an extremely durable film. It is, of course, toxic. But with caution can be used safely. Now large pictures could be made. They could be made cheaply and be unstretched and rolled up for transport from the studio to its destination. Now tempera had to be abandoned. Tempera is not flexible and canvas is a soft support. It bends and stretches, especially with humidity. Much more so than panels, which were composed of several pieces set together with the wood grain matched in opposing directions. So, while early canvases had mixed gesso and white lead oil grounds with paints composed of the old oil and tempera formula, experience taught that a straight oil technique was best. But how to preserve the matte and unctious qualities afforded by the tempera and oil technique? This was solved in part by a liberal use of white lead paint in the ground and underpainting, as the pigment had qualities similar to tempera. But a new was solution was found in the forests of the Venetian mainland and beyond. Resins derived from pine trees and also from plants in Asia imported to Venice could be mixed to oil paints to impart a less unctious quality to the paint and enable the preservation of fine detail in brush strokes. Venice turpentine, which is still available, added to linseed oil based paints gave artists the flexability in technique they needed. Damar varnish, a resinous by-product derived from a beetle feasting on trees in Asia has a similar quality and is soluble in turpentine. Damar is also of course an ideal varnish. A clear glaze applied to dried oils renders the colors more saturated and protects the surface. All paintings were varnished. The varnish could be removed at a later date as it remains soluble in turpentine even after drying. Mixed with linseed oil in small quantities removed that quality, so it could also be used as a medium. A word now about siccative oils. Linseed oil, as mentioned before, is not the only one. Poppy oil and walnut oil were also used, but never as much as linseed. Poppy and walnut oil are in fact clearer than linseed oil, but are much slower to dry. Poppy is often preferred for glazing or for more delicate colors, such as pastel mixtures, as it is clearer. They also retain the line better than linseed oil, as tempera mixtures do. Hair details were often rendered with poppy oil. The greater facility afforded by straight oil painting in general influenced the way artists painted their pictures. Gesture became more prominent and the Venetian masters such as Titian and Tintoretto painted in a manner similar to the French Impressionists some 300 years before Impressionism. Also the ability to paint in a large scale easily and often, given the economy and ease of canvas painting, encouraged new compositions with areas of "blank" space. One has only to think of the painting compositions of Caravaggio, which are often half covered in a shadowy void. The Venetian revolution obviously spread all over Europe and canvas surpassed panel painting decisively.

Nineteenth Century: The Industrial Revolution

Artists continued to belong to guilds and worked in workshops preparing their own materials through the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries in Europe. Their clients were the Church, Royalty, and the nascent Bourgeoisie. The age of experimentation with technique in the form of adjusting grounds for the support and the mixtures of mediums to control paint quality began to wane as industries prepared the pigments and mediums for the artist to consume and use directly. This was not necessarily a bad thing. Scientific innovation stimulated by the Enlightenment produced "quality control" and an effort was made to produce hitherto expensive colors cheaply. In fact, new colors were created from advances in metalurgy that produced inexpensive blues and greens from metal alloys and oxidization processes. Prussian Blue, Cobalt Blue, Ultramarine Blue, and Veronese Green, to name a few, are products of the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries. Landscapes for the urban middle class to hang in their city homes now abounded in green fields and blue sky. One has only to stroll the galleries of museums to notice the change in palette between the centuries. These pigments were available in powder or paint form in tubes, ready to squeeze out. Artists before had to hand grind the pigments in oil to produce paint ready for the canvas. "Grind" is not quite the right word because pigments were not really ground but rather mixed with oil on a marble slab using a muller. A pile of powder pigment was placed on a hard stone slab and drops of oil were added to the center little by little and smushed into the pigment with a glass muller. The different pigments react differently to the oil. The earth tones mix into a rather thick paste, while the blues, greens, yellows, and reds mix into a somewhat stringy substance. This is because these pigments were metal derived colors or synthetic colors and lack the body of the organic, earth derived hues. Artists had to adapt to these different qualities in working with these pigments. It encouraged a glaze technique for the synthetic colors lacking in body. Body could be imparted by mixing them with lead white or adding a resin, the former of course altering their color, sometimes drastically. One widely used and very effective technique was scumbling. A glaze was set down over a monochromatic and modeled surface, then the artist used opaque paint applied onto the still wet glaze with a very light touch. This produced, in effect, a light opaque glaze over the transparent one. The glaze locked the opaque paint in its film and created a fascinating range of tones. Skies, flesh tones, and drapery were all rendered with great nuance. Again, artists understood how to exploit the different qualities of the media used. A formula was established to create depth and variety of texture and color. A thick, matte monochromatic base was set down and allowed to dry. Successive layers were applied judiciously to intensify the light, full bodied forms and deepen the dark shadows...and all the transitions in between. Matte meant lead white, black, and the earth tones. Transparent meant blue, red, and green. To mitigate the glassy effect, scumbling was used. A gradual intensification of contrast was achieved. The industrial revolution produced materials which were more homogenous. Pigments were made to have uniform thickness and texture in the tubes. Separation of oil and pigments in the tubes was also discouraged by the introduction of wax. Sensitivity to the way mediums effected paints became less common and artists became less concerned with manipulating and exploiting the dichotomy of opacity and transparency. This produced a curious effect. As the publishing industry took off, so did books on the secrets of the old masters. How did Veronese get such brilliant color? What secret medium did he use? There was a desire to emulate the quality of old master painting and at the same time an interest in following the direction encouraged by the new materials and working methods. The new markets opened up by the Bourgeoisie gave artists an independence to pursue new subject matter and approach to their art. The ideal established since the Renaissance to create images with a realistic depth and form gave way to an interest in expressing new optical effects and an inner vision. Impressionism is as informed by changes in materials and working conditions for the artist as it is by ideological shifts. Artists began to work independently and to create pictures that abandoned depth and perspective and that celebrated the new spectrum of colors available to them and the ease with which they could be procured and deployed on canvas. The golden tone of countless musem pieces created with earth tones and varnishes gave way to primary colors and lavish, gestural painting. Dreams were depicted with a reliance on old techniques for verissimiluted and a daring embrace of bold, graphic forms to conjure the bizzare. The material quality of the materials used by the artist began to overtake cunning manipulation of that material to represent something else. At the same time, "conventional" artists were obsessed with achieving effects wrought by the old masters, in a context far removed from that in which the old masters worked. Another thing to consider is that the antique painting had aged. The materials used had changed overtime, becoming more transparent and thin. This in part accounted for the way they looked in 1855 and the way they look today. Varnishes had yellowed making them look duller. Some had actually intensified in quality given the way they had been constructed, with a brilliant white underpainting. The proto modernist works created at the end of the Nineteenth century foreshadowed abstraction with one more technological revolution on the horizon.

Modernism and the Advent of Plastic Paint

Modernism took hold in the early twentieth century. Artists by that point more or less worked independent of organized societies of professional painters. Their patrons were individuals buying art without a religious or civic association. The society for which they worked was the gallery world made up of individual dealers supplying art to individual buyers. Most of these artists worked in traditional media in an untraditional way. Oil paintings were not varnished. Matte, opaque paints were preferred to glazing, transparent pigments, and mixed technique. The gesture of the artist in the brushstroke took paramount importance, offering a unique index of a unique vision. What is interesting about this period is the extent to which arists turned to the old masters for inspiration, but with out desiring to copy their technique per se. They looked for figural types and attributes to imbue their work with a religious, metaphysical meaning. Or to conjure a sense of continuity with traditional visual culture that gave an exhilarating contrast to the modernist feel of their work. The materials they used and supports they chose were essentially the same: easel painting. The last revolution before our digital age was the advent of acrylic paint, invented in the 1920's. Acrylic paint is a plastic material for the binding agent of pigments. It is water soluble until exposed to air and dries into a flexible but inert film rapidly. It is unique in that it represents the entire spectrum of color available to the artist and needs only water to be manipulated. Probably its most amazing characteristic is that it is absolutely inert. It is non acidic and non hydroscopic, that is, it does not absorb or release humitidy. The film it creates is flexible, not brittle. All media before acrylic changed with time and with the weather. It even reacted to other materials such as the chalk in gesso or the glue used to size the canvas. Acrylic paints are non reactive. They don't contract with time. The only particular quality of acrylics is that they dry a little darker than when wet and, of course, their own plastic quality. They do not posses the matte intensity of tempera or the luscious brilliance of oils. Yet, their colors are saturated. Acrylics enabled artists to work in a non toxic enviroment and to work rapidly and cheaply. For painting and visual culture in general, photography aside, this is the last revolutionary innovation before the digital age, which of course is essentially another medium entirely. After the early experimentation with abstraction at the turn of the century, modern artists turned to classical art for inspiration. There was a desire to understand the materials and working methods of Renaissance artists. This movement echoed that of the late Eighteenth Century with the explosion of manuals on old technique. Giorgio De Chirico is a major figure in this modern movement to recover traditional technique and his approach influenced generations of artists with a curiosity for the past and a passion for the future. Contemporary artists working under the shadow of modernism strive to innovate and expand their language, and those who paint continue to mine the techniques of the old masters for inspiration since the medium offers more continuity than rupture with what went before. My name is James Thacker and I am a visual artist. I sell my artwork on ebay under the name Prospectnoir. Please click here to visit my about me page to read about my own personal techniques. If you would like to see my current listings on ebay, including paintings and drawings, click here