This essay is the second of a two-part series, and deals with the materials, techniques and physical history of easel picture-painting in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is inspired by looking closely at the collections of the National Gallery in London, England.    

 While there were certainly differences in the practice of painting north and south of the Alps – some mentioned in Part I and some to be discussed here – the similarities have often been underestimated. While a new Renaissance culture emerged first in Italy, and only slowly in spread to northern Europe toward the end of the fifteenth century, it would be misleading to conclude that Italy was always the primary source of cultural and artistic innovation. To do so doesn’t take into account the diversity of regional practices in both northern and southern Europe. Italy, for example, was not a unified entity but rather, an ever-shifting assemblage of independent political entities with varied histories, economies and cultural affiliations. We also tend to underestimate the speed with which ideas spread throughout Europe, even without the help of modern technology. Keeping this in mind, much of what was discussed in Part I regarding northern European painting, especially in Flanders, holds true for Italy: easel painting moved from panel to canvas, from tempera to oil, and from multi-part to single field formats, while the range of subject matter widened. Fine Arts Magazine   

  The medieval practice of painting on panel gave way to using canvas more rapidly in Italy, but this only occurred in one particular place. In fact, major centers such as Florence were as slow to give up panel painting as comparable cities in Flanders. The example of Raphael, one of the most famous of all Italian Renaissance painters despite his early death in 1520, is a case in point. During a prolific career that took him from Umbria to Florence and Rome, he painted less than a handful of known pictures on canvas in any genre. Painters working for the élite, as Raphael was, had little motivation to flout conventions that valued paintings on panel as more expensive to produce, more permanent, and hence more desirable than the more ephemeral paintings on fabric (which had their own long-standing tradition). It was the painters of the Republic of Venice who were the innovators in producing easel pictures on canvas. Why this was so is still a matter for discussion. The production of canvas was well-established in Venice during the Middle Ages, thanks to the demands of an extensive maritime commerce, and hence of a ship-building industry centered at the state-subsidized Arsenale, the largest shipyard in the world by the thirteenth century. Furthermore, the watery, damp environment of the city discouraged demand for fresco painting, which had become the preferred technique for decorating masonry walls throughout Italy. Frescos were the exception in Venice, although patrons did occasionally demand them, especially for exterior walls, ironically the most fragile of all; they have long-since vanished from the city’s buildings (although there are traces still to be seen in mainland cities that were formerly part of the Republic such as Treviso and Bassano del Grappa).    

  Painters and patrons rapidly took to the new practice of creating painted canvasses for interior walls. In the second half of the fifteenth century, narrative cycles were painted on canvasses stretched on wooden frames (now called “stretchers”), that in any other Italian city would have been applied as fresco to plaster walls. By the early sixteenth century, canvas was the norm for other genres, as well: portraits, pictures with newly-fashionable classical subjects, devotional pictures, and even altarpieces. As ceiling paintings on canvas began to rival wall paintings in popularity, and as bothtypes of pictures grew larger in size, standard widths of material had to be stitched together to achieve the desired size; the resulting seams can sometimes be detected by looking closely. Canvas could also be reused. The Venetian painter Tintoretto, who covered acres of wall and ceiling with his huge pictures, was particularly known for piecing together his canvas, sometimes of different weaves and sometimes re-cycled.    

 In fifteenth-century Italy, as in northern Europe, underdrawings were ubiquitous and generally quite detailed. That they were based on preparatory sketches executed in various media on paper – the latter in general use since the later Middle Ages – is generally assumed, although few single sheet drawings survive from before 1420 or so anywhere in Europe. The medieval painter’s workshop practice of maintaining “pattern books”, full of detailed studies that included figural poses, drapery, ornamental motifs, and plants and animals, encouraged the reuse of previously-executed drawings in the composition of paintings. Pattern books were valued possessions, often passed down from father to son. They seemed to have fallen out of favor in the fifteenth century as the preparatory process was expanded to include many more studies for a given work, usually on single sheets, and ranging from studies of individual hands or heads, for example, to general compositional arrangements.    

 The most celebrated practitioner of this expanded creative process was Leonardo da Vinci, whose career began in Florence in the 1470s. His drawings demonstrate that the process of composing a painting was, in theory, endless. His studies ranged from the macrocosm to the microcosm, breaking forms down into their component parts, and those, even smaller, switching figure poses from left to right and then from right to left, turning a sheet over to continue a visual idea on the reverse when the first side became undecipherable. It was conventional practice by this time for a painter to create a “presentation drawing” to show a patron what his picture would look like s, and then frequently, a “cartoon”, which was the painter’s guide for the painting process itself. These two types of drawings usually strove for clarity rather than elaboration. One of Leonardo’s drawings – probably intended as a presentation drawing or a cartoon – was so highly finished that it created a sensation and was put on public exhibition in Florence in 1501. That drawing is lost, but the one shown here, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, is considered similar, and a variant of the same subject, although a few years later in date. It is not only a testament to Leonardo’s skill, but also a crucial piece of evidence for the profound change in the role and status of drawings taking place around 1500. They were no longer just workshop props, but potential works of art in their own right, documenting the new value placed on the creativity and fame of individual painters, and worthy of being collected by connoisseurs.    

 Most drawings were still used to create paintings, however. Even highly successful painters reused ideas and motifs already captured in drawings by tracing or pouncing. Copy and reuse had been guiding principles of workshop practice since the Middle Ages. Apprentices learned by copying, more often from the master’s pattern books than from nature. Their aim was to emulate the master’s style, a skill that enabled an apprentice to rise to the level of assistant and begin to work on the master’s pictures. Even as some painters began to expand the creative process in the fifteenth century, and as most encouraged their pupils to copy from nature as well as from their drawings, workshops routinely made replicas and variants of completed pictures and continued to do so throughout the Renaissance. Some of these were produced at the request of patrons (especially if the original was owned by someone of higher status), while others were sold on the open market. The latter were produced without an advance commission, although a picture could always be “personalized” at a patron’s request with a different background, more use of expensive pigments (especially gold), or the addition of a coat of arms or even a portrait.    

 Giovanni Bellini, the most famous painter in Venice during the late fifteenth century, inspired and taught a generation of “madonnieri” who often specialized in devotional images of the Madonna and Child in the manner that he had popularized; most especially the half-length Madonna holding the Christ Child in front of a landscape, often behind a parapet, as seen in the two examples shown here – one by Bellini, the other attributed to his workshop. The number of surviving Venetian pictures of this subject testifies to the demand that must have existed, and suggests that a few of Bellini’s assistants specialized in the genre after setting up their own shops. Most buyers would have been satisfied with such a replica or variant “in the manner of Bellini”, even if it did not come from his hand or even from his shop, and the price would have been more affordable. Modern notions of the value of originality did not apply in the Renaissance, nor did that of copyright, although this is certainly the first period in western art when the idea of originality began to affect the reputation of artists and the price of their paintings and drawings.    

 As seen in Part I, Netherlandish painters took the lead in using oil paint for easel pictures early in the fifteenth century. Until recently, art historians assumed that this technique was first brought to Venice in the 1470s and was adopted enthusiastically by Venetian painters before it appeared elsewhere in Italy. Scientific analysis now suggests that the Italians were experimenting with oil as early as the 1450s, likely inspired by the Flemish pictures acquired by wealthy merchants and aristocrats, and by actual contact with the Flemish working in a number of cosmopolitan centers, including Ferrara and Venice. What was exceptional about the Venetian painters was their rapid, widespread adoption of the oil medium, as we see in the pictures of Giovanni Bellini (c. 1450-1516) and his contemporary Cima da Conegliano (c. 1459-c. 1517). The practice of glazing with pigments mixed in oil was the foundation of the Flemish approach (as discussed in Part I). Venetians pursued the same values as their northern models: reflectivity of light, glowing color, detailed description of material objects, and smoothly-finished surfaces where no brush stroke or other mark could be detected. Yet they also seem to have contributed to the evolution of the technique, especially in searching for more subtle, varied coloristic effects. Cima’s much-studied altarpiece, The Incredulity of St. Thomas, from c. 1502-04, is a case in point. Cima deepened the shadow of the Apostles’ draperies not only by the conventional practice of overlaying glazes of the same or related hues, but also by the much less common practice of glazing with the complementary hue, notably in the green draperies of the figures in the front row, where his final layer of glaze is a red lake. This achieved the desired effect of darkening the shadows and toning down the brilliant green, but simultaneously created a more complex hue, one not muddied by the addition of brown or black.    

 Cima’s painting is often cited as an example of the expanding variety of the Venetian painters’ palette, most vividly seen in the brilliant orange-yellow of St. Peter’s robe. The artist used two related pigments here, both sulphides of arsenic that were seldom used in the fifteenth century, but would become signature pigments of sixteenth-century Venetian painting: the yellow orpiment and the orange realgar. Venice was a destination for the acquisition of pigments by out-of-town painters. Furthermore, by the 1490s, perhaps earlier, those pigments were sold by specialist “color sellers” (“vendecolori”). It was a profession unique to Venice at this time. Throughout the remainder of Europe (including the rest of Italy), pigments were sold by generalist apothecaries, as they had been since the Middle Ages and would continue until later in the sixteenth century. Specialist vendecolori may very well have tried to increase demand by offering new or, unusual products, and we think that their shops became destinations for a variety of artisans who used colorants to share ideas as well as purchase supplies.    

As painters in other central and northern Italian centers began to shift to oil, albeit more slowly than had the Venetians, they also experimented with the technique. Three panels from Perugino’s Certosa di Pavia Altarpiece, c. 1496-1500, provide a useful example. The technique used in the blue drapery of the Archangel Raphael is representative of a painter transitioning between tempera and oil. The underpaint is tempera, but the choice of a light (off white) hue is typical of the light-to-dark process of oil glazing, and the glazes added over the tempera layer are ultramarine mixed with oil, thus creating a rich blue, but allowing light to reflect off the underlying white and back through the translucent, blue-tinted layers of oil. Scientists at the National Gallery have found unusual mineral substances in some of Perugino’s pictures, including this, as well in those of many of his contemporaries, including Raphael. Here the underpaint of St. Michael’s armor is a combination of lead white with lustrous particles of a tin-rich bronze powder, also found in the off- white underlayer of Archangel Raphael’s blue garment discussed above. While the metallic gleam of the pigment would have been compromised or invisible mixed with opaque lead -white for underpaint, it is still intriguing to speculate that Perugino chose to experiment with this substance as he contemplated how to achieve the metallic appearance of St. Michael’s armor.    

 Powdered glass is another substance found in the glaze layers of Perugino’s paintings, and also in early works of his younger co-worker Raphael (who was possibly Perugino’s assistant at one time) such as the Mond Crucifixion from c. 1502-03. The glass would seem to be an additive not intended to affect the final appearance of the picture, but that subject is still open to debate. Was the glass simply a drying agent for the oil (painters had to wait for each layer to dry before adding the next), did it act as an extender, adding body to the very soluble red lake paint (where it is most often found), and/or were the particles of glass intended to add more sparkle to the final surface? Not coincidentally, we begin to see some painters at this time showing other evidence of an increasing sensitivity to the appearance of their oil paints by selecting their oil binder dependent on the hue of pigment used, as was the case in Raphael’s Crucifixion. He used the less common walnut oil as a binder for the whites and light blues of the sky because it showed less tendency to yellow, while continuing to employ linseed oil for more saturated hues where yellowing would not be a factor, linseed oil more generally preferred as it dried faster than walnut.    

 Raphael’s picture also provides an early example of other changes in painters’ approaches to the oil technique, this time in its application, rather than in the nature, of the pigments. In the shadows of St. Jerome’s pale, purple-grey robe, Raphael used hatched brush strokes to create the shadows rather than floating successive glazes of red and/or blue to create a darker tone ( the National Gallery scientists point out that this area has altered to appear reddish-brown rather than the purple originally intended by the artist). The highlights in the subdued robe of the Madonna were glazed to allow the lighter under layers to show through, but instead of using a brush, Raphael used his fingers and the marks are visible. When painters began to leave marks with their paint, intentionally or not, they were beginning to manipulate the viscosity of oil paint in a way that interrupted the traditional anonymous, mirror-like finish of the final paint layer.    

 Here again it was the Venetian painters who most aggressively pursued new approaches to the oil technique that exploited the malleability of oil-based pigments as much as their transparency (although glazing was by no means abandoned). Titian (c. 1486-1576) and Giorgione (c. 1478-1510), a generation younger than Giovanni Bellini, but much indebted to him, took the lead. Titian’s Noli Me Tangere of c. 1514 provides a vivid example in the white loincloth of Christ. A relatively lean mixture of pigment and oil – using less oil to make the pigment thicker and stiffer – allowed the painter to accumulate the paint in globs that sat above the painted surface when applied with the brush. This is usually referred to as “impasto”, and it was used above all to create the optical impression of highlights. Furthermore, with a dry brush dipped in this mixture, a painter could drag the brush across the surface in a technique called “scumbling”, to produce the optical effect of transparency without glazing (an effect that would have been amplified by allowing the texture of the canvas to play a role). These approaches might be termed “optical approximation” as opposed to the descriptive application of oil paints that were then glazed to alter values, enrich hues and create life-like light effects.    

 Subtle distinctions in the texture of fabrics, even those of a single color, became a hallmark of this painterly style. As black became the fashionable color for the clothing of European élites in the sixteenth century, it was inevitably the color most often used in portraits. Painters rose to the challenge of monochromy by employing a full range of optical “tricks” to convey the differences between velvet, silk, wool and satin. These tricks included applying impasto, varying the direction and length of brushstrokes, and scumbling, in addition to glazing, varying hues by juxtaposing different black pigments (soot blacks, for example, produced a bluer black than bone blacks), and mixing in other colors. These subtleties are difficult to see in reproduction, especially in painterly pictures where heavy varnishes or past damage have abraded the three-dimensional surface. Such pictures are better examined “in person”, and we illustrate this point instead with a brighter, more colorful example by the Venetian painter Veronese (1528-88), his Dream of St. Helena of c. 1570, where one can see the play of the golden impasto highlights on her pink tunic, and for the blacks, a portrait by the Florentine Bronzino (1503-72). His Portrait of a Young Man of c. 1550, which also demonstrates that not all Italian painters adopted the Venetian’s painterly approach. Bronzino and his Florentine patrons preferred the slick, impersonal surfaces of traditional glazed paintings and an approach that relied more on traditional description than optical approximation. A closer look reveals, however, that despite his hard-edged contours, Bronzino’s interior modeling often relied on fluid transitions between colors produced by painting one pigment into another that was not yet dry, a technique referred to as “wet on wet”.    

 Finally, the framing of these simple rectangles of canvas, already stretched and nailed onto a wooden “stretcher”, was a relatively simple process. The taste for gilded frames seems to have been at least partially overtaken by a preference for frames of unpainted wood, often carved and sometimes touched up with gold. Venetian household inventories from the sixteenth century invariably refer to these frames as “walnut”, although it is impossible to know from the notaries’ generic short-hand how many were actually fashioned from that wood. These frames relate, not surprisingly, to contemporary taste in furniture, in which carved wood prevailed, with or without gilding; that was very different from the taste of earlier periods when furniture was invariably painted. What little we know about the price of frames suggests that they cost less than their earlier counterparts, often more elaborate (in part because they were used primarily for altarpieces and smaller religious pictures). In all periods it was certainly the cost of gold that drove up the price of a frame, although as new genres of picture appeared (in the period under discussion here, for example, portraits and pictures with classical subject matter), and as the formats were so often simple rectangles, carpenters and wood carvers could more easily find ways to simplify production and reduce costs.    

Looking closely at paintings as material objects is aesthetically rewarding. It also opens up the world of the past in at least some of its complexity, allowing us glimpses of the tastes and fashions, technologies, economies, and cultural aspirations of Renaissance painters and consumers. Coincidentally, the National Gallery in London is holding an exhibition from 30 June until 12 September, 2010 entitled Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries(www.nationalgallery.org.uk ) that explores some of these issues and also illuminates the role of conservation and scientific analysis in helping us to understand what we see.    

The author is indebted to the work of conservators and restorers at many museums in North America and Europe, but most especially to Dr. Barbara Berrie at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and the scientists and restorers at the National Gallery of Art in London, UK. The latter’s important publication, The National Gallery Technical Bulletin has some articles accessible to the non-specialist, and the Gallery’s relatively new “Raphael Research Project” is an exceptional resource, providing a wealth of technical information and useful bibliography to all.    

by Louisa C. Matthew, Ph.D., Contributing Writer    

Louisa Matthew received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1988 with a thesis on the altarpieces of the Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto. In addition to publications on Lotto, has published on painters’ signatures in Venetian Renaissance pictures and contributed to exhibition catalogues on various aspects of the same period. Recent work deals with the history of pigments in Venice, not only their use by painters but also their manufacture and commerce.    

A study of the profession of color seller in Venice, prompted by the discovery of a trove of documents in the Venetian state archives, has led to an on-going collaboration with Dr. Barbara Berrie, a chemist and senior conservation scientist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.    

Louisa Matthew is currently, professor of art history in the Department of Visual Arts at Union College, in Schenectady, NY. Grants have included a fellowship at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence Italy, a paired fellowship (with Dr. Berrie) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and grants from the Delmas Foundation.