Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

200

bone black; and if the painter expects painting the horse to be a day's work,

no other colors need be prepared fo r that day, apart from the five pigments

just mentioned.

It is notable that throughout hundreds of recipes of this kind, only a severely

limited range of pigments is prescribed. This provides a piece of information

that is of critical importance to the picture of the artists' practice being

sketched here: paint was only ground and prepared when it was needed. It is

precisely because painters wished to keep working without unnecessary delays

and therefore fo und it advantageous to use paint that dried quickly (thus

containing strong drying oils and other drying agents), that paint could not

be kept fo r long. If the complete range of pigments, each already ground

with oil, had to be available, this would mean that much paint would have

to be thrown away unused. Hence the economic reasons fo r the method of

working with restricted, specific palettes are clear. The technical background

of this method will be discussed briefly in this paper.

It is significant that the series of recipes recorded by Willem Beurs concludes

with flesh colors (16). Beurs writes as fo llows: "Just as we humans consider

ourselves the fo remost among animals; so, too, are we the fo remost subject of

the art of painting, and it is in painting human flesh that its highest achieve­

ments are to be seen" (17). The palette Beurs gives fo r painting human flesh

comprised mixtures of the pigments lead white, light ochre, schijtgeel (an or­

ganic yellow), vermilion, red lake, tawny ochre, terre verde, umber, and "coal

black" (probably ground charcoal which gives a bluish black). It was the

palette fo r what was considered to be the summit of creation, and the most

difficult subject of all to paint, the human figure. It is almost invariably the

palette fo r flesh colors that is depicted in self portraits and studio scenes after

1600, paintings that are generally intended to represent the art of painting at

its noblest.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has examined fifteenth-or six­

teenth-century paintings to any depth as material objects, that every passage

was executed as a separate entity. The additive character of the painting as a

whole is generally plain to see, despite the psychological compulsion percep­

tually acting on the viewer to transform the painting into a Gestalt.

Even though revolutionary developments during the seventeenth century

brought the pursuit of pictorial unity to an unprecedented level, the sources

quoted above suggest that no change had taken place in the tradition of using

recipes fo r various components of the painting. The economic rationale fo r

this approach has already been mentioned above. Originally, however, tech­

nical reasons may have provided an even stronger motivation fo r executing a

painting as a series of successive passages.

For the twentieth-century painter, who normally regards paint as a pasty

substance of a certain color that can be squeezed out of a tube, it is hard to

imagine that to artists of not only the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but

also through the first half of the nineteenth century, each pigment presented

its own inherent possibilities and constraints (18). Some pigments could not

be worked up with oil; some pigments could only safely be mixed with one

or two other pigments; some pigments could only be used transparently and

yet others only opaquely. Other properties, too, such as color permanence,

workability, drying qualities, and so on, could diff er so strongly from one

pigment to another that it was normal to use a given pigment either in pure

fo rm or mixed with any of a limited number of other pigments in order to

somewhat modifY the tone and color (19). This helps explain why, in the

work of artists such as van Eyck or Lucas van Leyden, the colors unmistakably

interlock like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and each color has an individual

character, especially as to transparency, surface texture, and thickness of the

paint layer. The most easily workable pigments were the earth colors, which

ranged from yellow ochre through red ochres to the darkest brown tints and

were varied in tone by mixing together and by the addition of white or

Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice