Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

one black; and if the painter expects painting the horse to be a day's work,
no other colors need be prepared for 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 found it advantageous to use paint that dried quickly (thus
containing strong drying oils and other drying agents), that paint could not
be kept for 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 for 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 follows: "Just as we humans consider
ourselves the foremost among animals; so, too, are we the foremost subject of
the art of painting, and it is in painting human flesh that its highest achievements
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 organic
yellow), vermilion, red lake, tawny ochre, terre verde, umber, and "coal
black" (probably ground charcoal which gives a bluish black). It was the
palette for 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 for 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 sixteenth-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 perceptually
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 for various components of the painting. The economic rationale for
this approach has already been mentioned above. Originally, however, technical
reasons may have provided an even stronger motivation for 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 differ so strongly from one
pigment to another that it was normal to use a given pigment either in pure
form 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
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Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice