Oil painting allowed colors to be mixed on the canvas and blended while wet, so artists could use gentle gradations in tone to create chiaroscuro and the effect of sfumato. 8 The ways paint and color were handled showed even greater variety. 7 Personal style and individuality flourished and paved a path for others to follow and actual practice – demonstrated by close observation and chemical analysis – was diverse and even idiosyncratic. 6 Although the guild structure would appear to have inhibited artistic exploration through regulations and requirements for workshop output, even the strictest rules did not, in the end, inhibit the use of novel materials. Trade accounts and bills of lading attest to the worldwide trade in precious materials for art-making, such as colors and resins that were imported from afar, but the local, the quotidian and the secret are more difficult to learn about, though equally important.
GOING MEDIEVAL MINING HOW TO
5 Treatises written for painters describe the core palette, and often include some information on how to prepare supports and use pigments, but often they only allude to practice and technique. 4 Inventories of color-sellers stores are helpful in judging the range available at a specific time and place but only seldom identify who used the supplies or how they were employed. Sources may include colors and prices, but are often imprecise in terminology and silent on the manner of use. Written descriptions of artists’ materials and practice give only parts of the picture. 3 In this chapter I will focus on cobalt, antimony and naphtha as three case studies that illustrate the impact that mining and technological discoveries had on painters’ materials and methods. Concurrent developments of theories of color liberated practice to be the artists’ guide and influence their ways of working.
GOING MEDIEVAL MINING FULL
Full exploitation of the potential of the oil medium to give impasted paint or translucent glazes was aided by production of solvents and diluents which became more available due to improvements in distillation of natural resins and increased mining for petroleum. These contributed to the world of color-making, providing new materials for glass-making, ceramic decoration and painters’ pigments. Such addition of colors followed the mining discoveries that occurred in present-day Germany, Austria and Hungary. At the turn of the sixteenth century, new sources of raw materials and production led to the manufacture of vast amounts of blue and yellow pigments that augmented their palette. Painters worked within this world of color using a wide array of materials. Attention to color was important not only in art, but as Valentina Pugliano describes in this volume, was a crucial part of identification and characterization for the scientific and medical disciplines and other areas of erudition. 1 A heightened sensitivity to color was present in society in general. Such writers included Gian Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1592), the Tuscans Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) and Raffaello Borghini (1537–1588), and the Huguenot physician, Théodore Turquet de Mayerne (1573–1654/5). The ability to paint such subtle differences in appearance was admired by many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers, who were not only critics but also described painting materials. In their search for mimesis, artists combined technical prowess with a keen sensitivity to hue and light, engaging acute powers of observation to discern the colors of shadows thrown on diverse surfaces, the difference between the luster of velvet and taffeta, or the quality of a gleam of light reflected from a mirror or from armor. These three discoveries contributed to the saturated colors characteristic of seventeenth-century painting and offered artists latitude in the ways they pursued their goal of imitative painting. Thinning paint allowed artists to use glazes of paint to lively, luminous, coloristic effect and made blending easier. The mention of naphtha in treatises and color-sellers’ inventories attests to its use in color making. Mining efforts also located sources for naphtha, and improvements in distillation would have allowed it (and other solvents) to be fractioned and purified for use as a solvent and diluent for oil paint. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, these pigments had found a permanent place on the easel painter’s palette, smalt used in place of ultramarine and the antimonial compounds enlivening the yellows of the spectrum. In the sixteenth century, the Erzgebirge mountains were mined for mineral ores of cobalt and antimony that were used to make the blue pigment smalt, a potash glass, and yellow pigments based on lead-antimony oxides, respectively.
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