Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

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to relate to the activities depicted on the previously mentioned engraving by

Collaert, which originated a hundred years earlier in the Netherlands. Using

available sources in this way is, of course, only justifiable when the phenom­

enon being investigated is widespread and displays a certain constancy. The

considerable mobility of painters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

provided many opportunities fo r the spreading of painterly techniques and

procedures. Many young painters traveled across Europe and worked in the

studios of various masters fo r shorter or longer periods; a similar situation still

exists in the international art restorers' world. This fo rm of mobility ensured

a rapid dissemination of knowledge and experience, leading to a high level

of international uniformity in knowledge and craft practices. Bearing this in

mind, one might venture a cautious guess that the question of what the youth

with the apron is doing in the studio of Stradanus could be answered by a

passage from the Volpato Manuscript, a seventeenth-century Italian docu­

ment. This text by Giovanni Battista Volpato (born in 1633) must date from

somewhere around 1680, and was written in the fo rm of a series of dialogues.

It contains the fo llowing exchange between F., an older painter's apprentice,

and Silvio, a younger apprentice (5):

Silvio: Tell me, if you will, whether you set your master's palette.

F: Surely .... It suffices Jor him to tell me what he intends to paint, Jor

I then know which colors I must place on the palette.

The engraving after Stradanus and this late-seventeenth-century text provide

two of the few hints-which until now have not been given any consider­

ation in the literature on art history and painting techniques-that painters

fo rmerly used palettes which were set with groups of colors specifically fo r

certain parts of the painting, and which thus did not include all the available

pigments. This understanding of the situation has a far-reaching consequence:

one must then see the seventeenth-century (but also earlier or later) painting

as a composite image made up of interlocking passages, comparable to the

giornate, the successively executed "daily portions," of fr esco painting, although

in the case of oil painting, a number of passages would have generally been

completed on a given day (6).

In using such a method, the seventeenth-century way of painting differed

fu ndamentally from the approach of late nineteenth-and twentieth-century

artists, namely in developing the painting as a tonal entity. For example, the

Hague School painter Jozef IsraeIs used a palette with a full range of colors

and with a mixing area covered with patches of mixed paint, of which the

tone and color could be fu rther modified. A palette of this kind enabled the

artist to continue working over the whole area of the painting simultaneously,

with an eye to controlling the tonal consistency of the painting.

In the first instance, the idea of earlier artists working in giornate as described

above may sound highly exaggerated. After all, we know that the great ma­

jority of seventeenth-century painters did in fa ct conceive their painting as

a tonal unity, as is evidenced by the practice of starting with a largely mon­

ochromatic or "dead color" underpainting (7). The point of importance here

is that after laying in the underpainting, the artist developed the composition

fu rther by successively adding islands of modulated local color. Once this is

understood, it becomes clear that a painting such as Rembrandt's Jewish Bride

has fa r more in common with work of predecessors such as Raphael than

with the paintings of Jozef IsraeJs and his contemporaries, however much

inspiration IsraeIs drew from that painting.

A method such as that described is intimately connected with the material,

technical, and economic constraints that were inherent to oil painting, con­

straints that only vanished (and were subsequently fo rgotten) with the intro­

duction of ready-to-use, "mutually compatible" tube colors (8).

The early palettes were small. Only in the course of the nineteenth century

did they grow to the size of small tabletops. It will be clear that this relatively

Historical Painting Tech niques, Materials, and Studio Practice