Artists’ Palettes and Colour Mixing
© 1999 & 2004 Don Pavey & Roy Osborne
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Artists’ Palettes and Colour Mixing
© 2004 Don Pavey and Roy Osborne. All rights reserved.
PART 4
Historical Palettes in Western Art
From the Renaissance to the Baroque
4.1. Colours of the Baroque Era
The Rococo or High Baroque period spans the first half of the
eighteenth century and harks back to the florid colour and ornamental decoration of the Early Baroque or Cavalier generation
(about 1610-50). Its fullest flowering was in Catholic France, Austria and Bavaria. In Protestant countries (such as England, Germany, Holland and Scandinavia) it was more restrained. France continues to be the principal cultural centre of Europe and the period is
dominated by the reign and extravagance of Louis VX (1710-74)
and his influential mistresses. The term ‘Baroque’ comes from a
Portuguese word meaning ‘irregularly shaped’, whereas ‘Rococo’
(or rocaille in French) means ‘shell-shaped’.
At times, during the Rococo period, an impression is given that
painters could do without the earth-colours altogether, as in William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753). Some of the ancient traditions of colour use were swept aside by a popular science that
pretended to apply Isaac Newton’s theories of colour to a manner
of painting that was now properly to be called ‘coloured imitation
of nature’. However, notions that were attributed to Newton were
often nothing more that colour phenomena observed by artists for
centuries, and hence it might be argued that painters ‘lost to science’ far more than they gained. However, the spectrum palette of
florid colours became an important medium for the new expression
of frivolity in Rococo painting, and a century later became a dazzling source of realism in the paintings of the French Impressionists. The Rococo colourist was certainly not encouraged to look on
the earths as elementary or primary colours.
In spite of the extremes of some Rococo painters, however, the four
earths still played an important role in artists’ palette, particularly
in the mixing of flesh-tints. They also composed the silvery foundation for the light accents of rose-Pompadour or cobalt powderblue. Over a classical basis of ‘optical’ greys and russet, the shimmering atmosphere of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s paintings was only
partly caused by his detached brushstrokes of different colours and
the alternating patches of complementary colours, which can be
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seen for example even in the red and green tones of the modelling
in his nudes. Watteau also inherited much from the older traditions.
At one time he owned as many as 40 Rubens canvases, and learned
from Rubens something of Titian’s handling, in the thin impasto of
the brushwork, and the ‘optical’ glazes. But he was the last of the
line.
In his Specimen philosophiae naturalis of 1703, the Danish physician C. T. Barthold promotes the three-primary red-yellow-blue
system of colour mixing, and a year later, John Harris’ Lexicon
Technicum lists a wide if not complete range of artists’ pigments in
use at that time. In 1752, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, in a lecture to the
French Academy, proposed that all available colours should be
used and that each should have five or six pre-mixed light tones
arranged in tonal sequence. In Nicholas Lancret’s paintings, there
is an almost prismatic stridence and, while the high-key scale of
Quentin de la Tour’s colouring is tempered by the chalkiness of his
pastel medium, it was well adapted to express the exquisite charm
of his sitters. Furthermore, some of the favourite colours of the
eighteenth century were named after the liquid translucency of certain wines, such as the vibrant acid-yellow and green chartreuse,
and the ruby-reds of Bordeaux and claret.
The Italian portraitist Rosalba Carriera was the first major artist to
exploit the technique of pastel drawing, influencing later practitioners, including Quentin de la Tour and Jean-Baptiste Peronneau.
Pastel is similar to watercolour in that its medium is gum arabic,
but in the form of dry sticks which are not moistened with water.
Pastel chalks are made in moulds, and their consistency is deliberately fragile enough to allow the pigment within them to rub off
when pressed onto a rough paper surface. Delicate high-key blending effects, which lent themselves to the depiction of flesh, are
achieved not with repeated strokes of the brush but by blending
with stick of coiled paper (or ‘stump’).
In another treatise on oil-painting (Der wohl anführende Mahler,
1753), Johann Melchior Croeker shows that the Medieval shape for
the ‘colour-board’ or palette was still in use in the eighteenth century. He also described the temporary preservation of oil colours by
putting them in a flat, tin box and then covering them with water,
so that they do not form a skin (a method still used today). For
more permanent storage, the pigments were stored in pig- or oxbladder bags, one for each colour. His manual also describes how
to prime paper for oil painting with white and different colours, including brown, Yellow Ochre, Indigo, ‘cool’ black, or grey obtained from a mixture of black and white.
Prussian Blue was the first artificially made pigment of the ‘modern’ age. Its process of manufacture was discovered accidentally by
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a German paint-maker called Diesbach in Berlin in 1704, and its
ferro-ferrocyanide composition was kept secret for 20 years. Following its introduction, it rapidly proved to be an indispensable,
permanent and relatively inexpensive addition to the artists’ palette,
which previously had to rely for blues on a cobalt-glass pigment
(Smalt) or else prohibitively expensive Genuine Ultramarine. It became common practise in the eighteenth century to match the colour of foliage by glazing a transparent yellow (such as Gamboge)
over a Prussian-Blue lay-in, or else by adding a touch of Prussian
Blue to Yellow Ochre.
The typical methods of the English eighteenth-century artist are
probably those outlined in Thomas Bardwell’s manual of 1756.
Even before Bardwell, a Titianesque grey ground had been described by John Barrow in his Dictionarium Polygraphicum
(1735). This consisted of a mixture of black and white laid over
Red Ochre, making a ground that exhibited a silvery quality. Bardwell however repeated almost word for word the process of modelling flesh given in The Excellency of Pen and Pencil (probably by
William Sanderson) of 1668.
Rococo
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Thomas Bardwell (1704-67). A fashionable English portrait painter, Bardwell wrote The Practice of Painting and Perspective Made
Easy (1756), which became the most popular English art treatise of
the century. It is thought that he was at some time employed in
copying works by Rubens and Van Dyck, and his treatise sums up
much of what was known of the Titian-Rubens tradition. He
acknowledged the austere (four-earth) palette described by Pliny,
and states that Roger de Piles thought that the ancients used these
colours not for their finished works but for under-painting or ‘deadcolouring’. Thus Bardwell and de Piles, both great admirers of Titian and Rubens, appreciated the practicability of such a method,
though neither seemed realise that it actually was the Venetian
method; hence Bardwell felt some bitterness at the Old Masters for
not having communicated their ‘secret’ to later generations. The
fundamental ingredients of Bardwell’s palette were the four-earth
(tetrachrome) pigments supplemented with red and yellow glazes.
This series of colours makes a tonal as well as a colour gamut on
the palette. Bardwell’s initial drawing was done in a ‘beautiful
murrey colour of middle tint’, mixed from Crimson Lake, Ivory
Black, Indian Red and White Lead. This provided a general ground
of shadows ‘as if the portrait was to be finished with that tint only’,
for ‘it mixes with the lights delightfully and produces a pleasant
clean colour, a little inclined to the reddish pearl’. The warm highlights of the flesh were of Yellow Ochre mixed with white, but the
ground of the flesh was laid-in with Light Red and white. For exquisite touches of colour, he included on the palette tints of Vermil-
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ion and white, Carmine and white, and a rose-tint from Crimson
Lake and white with a little Indian Red. His three ‘cold’ halftones
were a greyish tint from black and white, ‘a fine retiring colour of
great use in gradations’. This was supplemented by with a greenish
tint from Prussian Blue, Yellow Ochre and white, and a bluish tint
from Ultramarine and white. The warmish darks were mainly variations of Crimson Lake, Indian red and black. The first and lightest
of the ‘darks’ was the drawing-in tone (of Crimson, black, red and
white); the second was a deep, rich red (Crimson plus very little
Indian red); the third was a very dark, rich red (Crimson and
Brown-pink); and the fourth was Ivory Black with a little Indian
Red. It was to be noted that blues glazed over reds gave purples,
and blues over yellows the greens. He also describes a palette for
painting a portrait: ‘At the first sittings the drawing and dead colouring is completed with shadows’. He gives a greyish half-tint (a
lead tint) that could be greenish or bluish. This was laid on thinly,
and highlights were added with a tint of Light Red and a warm
shade. In the final sitting, glazing colours were added: Crimson
Lake, Brown-pink, Prussian Blue and Ivory Black. The organisation of his palette was as follows: White Lead, Light Ochre with
two tints, Light Red with two tints, Indian Red, Vermilion and
tints, Carmine, Crimson Lake plus Vermilion and white, Brownpink, Ultramarine plus a White Lead tint, Prussian Blue, a green
tint, a half-shade tint of Indian Red plus white, Burnt Umber, a
shade, a rose shade and a warm shade. Bardwell’s book became
such a universal painting manual that it went into a hundred editions (most of them without crediting its author).
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Thomas Bardwell’s palette: White Lead, Naples Yellow (Light
Ochre), Yellow Ochre, Brown-pink (dull orange), Indian Red,
Light Red, Red Ochre, Burnt Umber, Vermilion, Crimson Lake,
Carmine, Prussian Blue, Genuine Ultramarine, Ivory Black.
Reference: Thomas Bardwell, The Practice of Painting and Perspective Made Easy (1756). Also Frédéric Schmid, The Practice of
Painting (1948).
François Boucher (1703-1770). French painter. Boucher’s use of
colour typifies the frivolity and sensuality of the court of Louis XV
and Madame de Pompadour, whom he painted on a number of occasions. A versatile, fashionable artist and Rubenist, he became Director of the French Academy in 1755. He used colour on largescale mural decorations and tapestries for palaces at Versailles and
Fontainebleau, as well as in stage-sets for the theatre and opera,
typically depicting sensuous nymphs and shepherds and gods and
goddesses. Famous for the delicacy of his flesh-colour, he created
charmingly erotic scenes in the style of the fêtes galantes. He used
dead-colouring (abbozzo) under-painted in earth-colours and over-
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painted with delicate, coloured glazes. His most important pupil
was Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
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François Boucher’s palette (about 1765): Flake White (White
Lead), Naples Yellow (Light Ochre), Yellow Ochre, Vermilion,
Rose Madder, Crimson Lake, Brown Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Cobalt
Blue.
Jean-Baptiste Chardin (1699-1779). A popular French painter of
still life, Chardin used qualities of paint that give depth and power
to the humblest of objects, such as glassy glazes of ceramics and
heavy impasto of the rind of fruit or cheese. His exquisite and
painterly realism was somewhat in contrast to the superficial extroversion of the aristocratic Rococo style. Escaping from the world of
elegant fantasy into the genre of the peasant, his silvery greys, russet-browns and rich ochres were only here and there enhanced with
local tints of hyacinth or lilac; and yet his works are no less inperiod, embodying as they do a profound belief in the importance
of trivialities. Chardin’s painting bears a resemblance to that of the
travelling journeyman, and to an older tradition, with its earthcolour principals. A picture (in the Cognaque Museum, Paris)
showing his palette displays White Lead, with Vermilion set near
the thumb and leading a row of five earth colours.
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Jean-Baptiste Chardin’s palette (about 1765): Flake White (White
Lead), Naples Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Ochre, Burnt Umber,
Vermilion, Light Red, Prussian Blue, Ivory Black.
Reference: Frédéric Schmid, The Practice of Painting (1948).
William Hogarth (1697-1764). The English painter Hogarth, otherwise a rebel against his despised ‘black masters’, rephrased at
least one aspect of the classical doctrine. He closely observed the
diaphanous nature of skin and its underlying coloration, and used
colour to suggest people as sentient beings: the pleasure-bent rake
and the affable innocent virgin, the pompous snob and the garrulous confidence trickster. He was the most formidable colouristic
revolutionary of his time. Isaac Newton’s Opticks (1704) had a profound effect on painters, and prompted Hogarth to design the first
‘spectrum’ palette, described in his Analysis of Beauty (1753). At
least in theory, he entirely changed the layout of the painter’s palette by setting the prismatic colours (the so-called ‘Virgin Tints’)
down the centre of his palette, and banishing the earth pigments.
His directions for colour mixing stressed that ‘There are but three
original colours in painting, besides black and white, viz., red, yellow and blue’. In this, he was most likely influenced by Gérard de
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Lairesse, whose painting manual (1707) appeared in English translation in 1735. Hogarth considered that the most beautiful colours
were the Virgin hues and their tints; the shades, with black added,
were an ugly necessity. As in earlier, sixteenth-century painting
there was again in his time the problem of ‘coldness’ caused by the
presence of black in the shadow-mixtures. Again, the problem was
overcome by the use of the ‘warm’ ground, and by glazing; but
whereas the sixteenth-century masters made use of natural, deep
colour of the varnish – clear varnish then being unobtainable – he
glazed his flesh-shadows with brown madder. His half-shades on
planes turning from the light were of a greenish tinge, which was
characteristic of much eighteenth-century painting. There is a palette of Hogarth’s in the collection of the Royal Academy of Arts,
London.
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William Hogarth’s palette: Flake White (White Lead), Orpiment
(yellow), Vermilion, Brown-madder, [?] Malachite Green, Genuine
Ultramarine, purple (possibly a mixture of Madder and Prussian
Blue), Prussian Blue, Ivory Black.
Reference: William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753).
Jacob Christoph Le Blon (1667-1741). The French-Saxon artist
and engraver Le Blon, who worked in Rome, Amsterdam, London
and Paris, is credited with the invention of the first practical threeprimary process of colour-image reproduction. His process was patented in London in 1719, and he subsequently produced some
10,000 mezzotints of portraits and other works of art, stating confidently that ‘Painting can represent all visible Objects, with three
Colours, Yellow, Red and Blue; for all other Colours can be compos'd of these Three, which I call Primitive.’ Together with LouisBertrand Castel, Le Blon was probably first to attempt a theory of
colour harmony based on these primary colours. Following on from
Isaac Newton, he also described the difference between what James
Clerk Maxwell was later to describe as ‘additive’ and ‘subtractive’
colour mixtures, or what he described as between the ‘Impalpable’
and ‘Material’ colours. In his short Coloritto (1725), he sets out his
flesh-tints: Vermilion plus white; Vermilion, Crimson Lake and
white; Light Red, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber and white; and Burnt
Sienna, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber plus white. From these, he observed, ‘We may represent a numberless number of nudes or nudities, as different as our hearts can desire or our imagination can
fancy or conceive’.
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Jacob Christoph Le Blon’s palette: Flake White, Yellow Lake
(Primary Yellow), Vermilion (Primary Red), Crimson Lake, Light
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Red, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, Prussian Blue (Primary Blue).
Reference: Jacob Christoph Le Blon, Il Coloritto; or, The Harmony
of Colouring in Painting (1725).
Baroque Classicism
Discerning
In 1651, the surviving writings of Leonardo da Vinci were published for the first time in a French edition, Traité de la peinture. A
translation of Alberti’s Della pittura (first published in 1435) appeared in the same year. Both had a profound influence on the architect and writer André Félibien, and on the painter and writer
Charles-Alphonse du Fresnoy. Together with the painter Charles
Lebrun (who had championed Nicolas Poussin’s painting), the two
writers became the leading classically biased art theorists of their
generation.
In 1672, in his New Theory about Light and Colours, Newton regarded as ‘opposite’ the colours red and blue, yellow and violet,
and green and ‘a purple close to scarlet’ – correctly identifying
what were later identified as complementary-colour pairings. In
1671 he wrote, ‘as you see, Blew and Yellow powders, when finely
mixed, appear to the naked eye Green, and yet the colours of the
Component corpuscles are not really transmuted, but only blended.
For when viewed into a good Microscope, they still appear Blew
and Yellow interspersedly’.
Following his observation of sunlight dispersed and reconstituted
with the use of glass prisms, Isaac Newton concluded (1672), that
‘The Colours of all natural Bodies have no other origin than this,
that they are variously qualified to reflect one sort of light in greater plenty than another.’ According to Newton, ‘The Original or
primary colours are, Red, Yellow, Green, Blew, and a Violetpurple, together with Orange and Indico, and an indefinite variety
of Intermediate gradations’. His classification had originally consisted of 11 colours (‘scarlet, or purple, red-lead, lemon yellow,
golden-yellow or sun-golden (heliocryseus), dark yellow, green,
grass-green, sea-green, blue, indigo and violet’), a sequence he
eventually reduced to seven, a number that had occult and religious
significance.
Newton’s celebrated colour circle, referring to the colourproportions of the solar spectrum, was not published until 1704.
Three years later, Gérard de Lairesse proposed that such a sequence
be adopted by the artist, if not in actual practice then in allegory,
since he printed an engraving of Iris resting on a cloud, ‘her arm
upon the Rainbow’, so that ‘the various colours thereof reflect on
the Painting’s Pallet’. Newton considered that mixtures of ‘the coloured Powders which Painters use’ did produce a ‘white’, but one
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of low brilliance, the colour ‘dun’, for example, ‘or russet brown,
such as are the Colours of a Man’s Nail, of a Mouse, of Ashes, of
ordinary Stones, of Mortar, of Dust and Dirt in High-ways, and the
like’. This was he realised because ‘all colour’d Powders do suppress and stop in them a very considerable part of the Light by
which they are illuminated’. An exemplary version of the classical
stance is included in De coloribus derivatis, by Arnold de Riols
(1741).
In 1673, the first edition of Traité de la mignature was published in
Paris. In 1708, a supplement to original text also included a colour
circle. The treatise, which supports the red-yellow-blue-primary
theory, also suggests the use of different coloured grounds of various umbers, ochres, greys, and even blue. Its author was ‘Claude
Boutet’, though the name was probably a pseudonym for its original publisher, Christophe Ballard. The book was so popular that it
ran to over 30 editions by 1800. In 1681, the French scientist Edmé
Mariotte published De la nature des couleurs the first half of which
dealt with spectral lights and the second half with pigments. Mariotte maintained that there were five ‘principal colours’ (white,
black, red, yellow and blue) and that all other colours can be mixed
from them. Sir Peter Lely was known to arrange up to 40 mixed
tints on his palette when painting portraits.
Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646/49-1723). German-born painter, who
trained in Amsterdam, where he may have come into contact with
the elderly Rembrandt. He later settled in London and became a
celebrated portraitist and Principal Painter the King William III (in
1691). He trained a large number of assistants in his workshop, his
methods thereby becoming highly influential. He was appointed
Governor of the first Academy of Painting in London (until 1716,
when he was succeeded by James Thornhill).
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Godfrey Kneller’s palette: White lead, Orpiment (yellow), Yellow
Ochre, Raw Sienna, Raw Umber, Red Ochre, Madder, Green Earth
(Terre Verte), Malachite Green, Cobalt Blue (Smalt), Genuine Ultramarine, Ivory Black.
Jean-Baptiste Corneille (1646-95). French painter and Royal
Academician. Probably the first manual to give considerable attention to the artists’ palette was Corneille’s Les Premiers Éléments de
la peinture practique of 1684, which includes contributions from
the Rubenist historian and diplomat Roger de Piles. The book proposes that there are eight ‘capital’ colours from which all others
can be derived by mixture. Corneille also shows how these pigments (White Lead, Yellow Ochre, Yellow Lake, Terre Verte,
Vermilion, Naples Yellow, Carmine and Ultramarine) were usually
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arranged on the palette, as well as recommending Titian and Paolo
Veronese as models of how to use them. He also presents one of
the first descriptions by a French academic painter of blue usage in
flesh. On a grey ground the lights are to be modelled systematically
with white and yellow, with more Vermilion and Carmine towards
the half-lights; and it was in these half-lights that Ultramarine was
added, with less white, either in imitation of the bluish colours of
the miniature or of the bluish and violet pearly glaze effects of the
Venetians. In Corneille’s method, the half-darks are mixed from
Carmine, Yellow Ochre and Ultramarine, the deepest shades being
built up from Brown-pink, Carmine and Bone Black. His palette
and method are closely similar to those described in Claude Boutet’s School of Miniature, first published in 1673.
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Jean-Baptise Corneille’s palette (1684): Flake White (White Lead),
Naples Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Yellow Lake, Brown-pink (dull orange), Vermilion, Carmine, Green Earth (Terre Verte), Genuine
Ultramarine, Bone Black (Ivory Black).
Reference: Corneille, Les Premiers Éléments de la peinture practique (1684).
Gérard de Lairesse (1640-1711). Flemish painter and engraver
who published his Groot schilderboek in 1707. An English translation, The Art of Painting, was published in 1735. The colourful
palettes of the Rococo generation threatened to extinguish the classical palette, and a near death-blow to the ancient, four-colour tradition was dealt by Lairesse’s treatise. Though he probably did not
appreciate fully the function of four-colour Venetian underpainting, he did seem to take it for granted that a picture should be
built up from the dead-colouring, which is to say the ‘First Tint’,
and above it the ‘Second Tint’, and then, finally, the retouching.
Under ‘Lights and Shades’, he explains that the under-painting
should be even and dull (matt), and the colours should be of the
same nature as the over-painting. A sky for example should be
dead-coloured with Indigo and white, the ground with Umber and
white, or else Lamp Black and Light Ochre, and architecture and
stonework with Umber or Brown Ochre. He exhorted the painter to
‘Seek the colouring, not in Spagnolet [the painter G. M. Crespi] or
Carlot, but in Nature herself; let your Carnations be as natural as
possible’. He was a close observer of nature and of accidental effects of atmosphere, reflections and colour illusions. M.-E.
Chevreul no doubt developed his laws of simultaneous contrast of
colour from his reading of the French edition of Lairesse (1787). In
figure-painting, he recommends that a female nude should be deadcoloured with white and Brown-red with, in the ‘Second Colouring’, white and a little Vermilion. For a young male, a little Light
Ochre is added. A sallow or sunburnt peasant has white, Brown-red
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and Umber in the ‘First Tint’, and Light Ochre and white for the
‘Second Tint’. Although he was reticent in making use of coloured
reflections in drapery, Lairesse did not merely use mixtures of
black and white with his colours for gradations of tone (in the manner of Leonardo da Vinci). He did not therefore rely on his ‘Potentials’ (black and white) for the modelling of form, and explained
that a ‘Capital colour’ (yellow, red or blue) might be ‘broken’ by
mixing it with a darker variety of a pigment of similar hue ‘as red
Orpiment with brown Oker, Umber, or such like, which nevertheless remains yellow. After such a Manner we may handle all the
Colours, to wit, beautiful Green, with other Green; Red with Purple; Violet, with Blue or Grey, and so forth; in a Word, if but one of
the two be less beautiful’. There is a portrait of Lairesse by Rembrandt in the Metropolitan Museum, New York.
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Gérard de Lairesse’s palette (1707): Flake White (White Lead),
Light Ochre, Raw Umber, Brown Ochre, Vermilion, Red Orpiment, Brown-red, Smalt (cobalt glass), Indigo, Genuine Ultramarine, Lamp Black.
Reference: Gérard de Lairesse, The Art of Painting, in All Its
Branches (1735).
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69). Dutch painter and printmaker.
Rembrandt is said to have acquired his brown tonality from his Italian-schooled master, Pieter Lastman. His under-painting, which
consisted of mixtures of the four earth-colours, was taken almost
directly from Titian, though it is doubtful that he was aware of the
classical origin of Titian’s palette. On a pale-grey ground, Rembrandt would typically make a rich, golden drawing with ochre,
over which he built various layers of ‘optical’ greys and redbrowns in solid and glazed colours. Like Titian, he used Asphaltum
in the glazes of his over-painting, applied (at least in his earliest
paintings) with a badger-hair blender and, later in life, with a spatula. It has been suggested that he used Massicot (or more likely Naples Yellow) in his highlights. His medium of boiled linseed oil
and mastic-resin diluted with Venice turpentine gave a heavy richness to the qualities of his pigments, but the Asphaltum glazes have
unfortunately deepened most of the shadows in his paintings beyond recovery, so that what we see today is far from their original
appearance. For his brush-drawings (such as Sleeping Woman,
1635; British Museum) he used Bistre (soot brown), from charred
wood. In a portrait by his pupil Gerrit Dou, Rembrandt is shown
working with a large oval palette with colours organised tonally
around the perimeter.
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Rembrandt’s palette: Flake White (White Lead, with 25% chalk),
[?] Naples Yellow, Massicot (Lead-tin Yellow), Yellow Ochre,
Vermilion, Red Lake, Red Ochre, Burnt Umber, [?] Cologne Earth
(Vandyke Brown), Asphaltum, Malachite Green, greens (mixed
from Massicot and Azurite or Smalt), Azurite Blue, Smalt (copper
glass), Lamp Black.
Reference: Waldemar Januszczak, Techniques of the World’s Great
Painters (1980).
The Early Baroque
Stylistically, the beginning of the Baroque period, about 1610,
brought a revival of rich ornamentation and decoration, following
the austere Catholic and Protestant extremism of the late sixteenth
century. There is a return to florid and sumptuous colour, celebrated in the Cavalier fashions superbly captured in portraits by Anthony van Dyck, and somewhat reminiscent of early sixteenth-century
Mannerism. Pietro de Cortona was principal painter of the period in
Italy, producing sotto in sù frescoes in Rome, and publishing a
Treatise on Painting in 1652 that stressed traditional and moral
values in art.
By the early 1600s the palette had become a subject of discussion
for painters. Louis Turquet de Mayerne observed, for example, that
‘the first function of the palette is to arrange the colours, the second
to temper them with oil, and the third alliance et mélange’. He
thought it was essential to put the light colours near the thumbhole, and that the palette should be prepared for all colours the
painter intended to use for the whole of the picture. In a painting of
the 1620s by Domenichino, for the dome of S. Andrea della Valle
in Rome, a palette held by St Luke shows a line of colours from
white near the thumbhole through bright red and bright yellow to
darker colours, including brown. About 1635, the Utrecht artist Judith Leyster (a pupil of Frans Hals, and a close contemporary of
Rembrandt) produced a portrait of herself holding a palette. In Seville, Francisco Pacheco wrote El arte de la pintura, the most important Spanish treatise on painting, begun about 1607 but not finished until 1638, with a second edition in 1649.
In his Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664),
the Irish chemist Robert Boyle writes in support of the threeprimary red-yellow-blue theory of colour mixing: ‘And … ‘tis of
advantage to the contemplative Naturalist, to know how many colours and which colours are Primitive (if I may so call them) and
Simple, because it both eases his Labour by confining his most solicitous Enquiry to a small number of Colours upon which the rest
depend, and assists him to judge of the nature of particular compounded colours, by shewing him from the Mixture of what more
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Simple ones, & of what Proportions of them to one another, the
particular Colour to be consider'd does result’.
Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). French-born painter who, after
working decorations for the Luxembourg Palace, settled in Rome in
1624. Although he greatly admired Titian’s work (as seen in his
works of the early 1630s), unlike Titian, Poussin’s own paintings
had no superstructure of modelling to support the filmy paint-layers
above the coloured ground. Had he settled in Venice during his
time in Italy he might have absorbed the local Titianesque tradition;
but in the event he stayed in Rome where the relatively degenerate
Romano-Florentine method of using oil instead of egg was practised, without the substantial under-painting of the Venetian Mannerist style. His early paintings were criticised for their naturalism
and richness of colour, before his style developed an increasingly
classical bias, chiaroscuro and solemnity under the influence of
Domenichino, Raphael and Giulio Romano, together with ancient
Roman statuary, which had first impressed him in the Royal Library in Paris.
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Nicolas Poussin’s palette (about 1660): Flake White (White Lead),
Naples Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Vermilion, Light Red, Brown-pink
(dull orange), Crimson Lake, Green Earth (Terre Verte), Genuine
Ultramarine, Vine Black, Bone Black (Ivory Back), Lamp Black.
Reference: Don Pavey, Colour and Humanism (2003).
Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). The greatest colourist of the
Early Baroque generation was the Flemish painter Rubens, who
entered the Antwerp Painters Guild in 1598. Two years later he
travelled to Italy in order that he might complete his classical and
artistic education, and it was in Venice that he ‘accomplished himself in colouring, by the accurate observations he made on the style
of Titian and Veronese’. Later, in Madrid, he painted copies of 20
of the magnificent Titians he found there. On his return to Antwerp
he accepted the appointment of Court Painter to the Spanish Governors of the Netherlands and was in time to acquire some 20 Titian
paintings of his own. He was known to be an associate of François
d’Aguilón, a Jesuit mathematician who published his Opticorum in
1613. The text may well integrate Rubens’ colour theories contained in his own book, De lumine et colore, which – like Poussin’s
text on colour – is presumed lost. A diagram in Aguilón’s book
clearly promotes the three-primary-colour theory, with the basic
hues red (rubeus), yellow (flavus) and blue (caeruleus) mixing to
make orange (aureus), green (viridis) and purple (purpureus).
Aguilón refers to two distinct ways of mixing paints physically:
compositio realis, or the standard pigment intermixture, such as
green resulting from ‘a mixture of yellow and blue’, and composi-
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tio intentionalis, which refers to a scumbling technique of one colour partially covering another. Rubens quite probably reconstructed
classical four-earth palette, and used it in his modelli. Like Titian,
Rubens also laid at least as his first undercoat the silvery grey imprimatura in egg-oil emulsion. The lucidity of his paintings was
caused partly by his brilliant white ground striking through the imprimatura, and partly by his handling of the films of resin-oil colour, rather like hazy, translucent enamels. A Vermilion or Redbrown drawing is often noticeable in Rubens’ work, and the tempera under-painting was glazed over with varnish or balsam, and a
vaporous quality was given to the colour by its suspension in sunthickened linseed or walnut-kernel oil with mastic or Venice turpentine. In the highlights, Rubens generally used half-covering
tones of whitish carnation – perhaps of Naples Yellow tinted with
white. He commonly worked on wooden panels primed with gypsum, and often painted alla prima, employing grey or light-brown
grounds, some of which later darkened.
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Peter Paul Rubens’ palette (about 1630): Flake White (White
Lead), [?] Naples Yellow, Orpiment (yellow), Yellow Lake, Yellow Ochre, Vermilion, Light Red, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Red
Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Madder, Green Earth (Terre Verte), Malachite Green, Vert Azur (cobalt oxide), Cobalt Blue (Smalt), Genuine Ultramarine, Ivory Black.
4.2. Palettes of the Classical Renaissance
The first European treatise of processes used in dyeing, the Mariegola del’ arte de tinctori, was published in Venice in 1429. It
was added to in 1510, and was followed in 1548 by the researches
of the dyer Gioanventura Rosetti. The Crimson Lakes used by the
great Venetian painters were extracts from the root of the madder
plant that grew wild on the plains around Ravenna. This was treated with the astringent juice of the poplar to make it permanent or
(for delicate rose-pinks) with the bark of the beech. The crimson
Venetian silks were dyed with kermes, a preparation from the bodies of the female Coccus ilicis insect inhabiting the leaves of the
holm oak, Quercus coccifera, which dies when it stings the bark.
The dyestuff was called Venetian scarlet by the French, and was
considered a most durable and revered colorant, in use since the
time of ancient Egypt. Scarlet grain or grana, if not identical with
kermes, was at least very similar to it, and widely used in Europe
and in the East.
Venetian painters also painted with lac, an insect exudation that
forms the basis of shellac. This lac-lake, a dye of low intensity, had
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a violet cast and was often confused with lacca, a dye said to be
from ivy-juice. Most of these red dyes however were replaced in
the early sixteenth century by brazilwood, known to the Italians as
verzino, and by crimson from an insect bred on the Cactus coccinifera, the cochineal, which began to be imported from Mexico.
Regarding writings on art and colour theory, perhaps the most significant treatise of the late-sixteenth century was written by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, a Milanese painter whose career was cut
short by blindness at the age of 33. A large portion of his Trattato
dell’arte de la pittura (1584) was translated into English by Richard Haydocke and published in 1598. Regarding painters’ pigments, he promotes a basic palette of seven colours, as follows:
‘Now there be 7 Sortes of Simple colours, from which all the rest
arise, of these 2 extreames, as WHITE & BLACKE, and 5 middle,
as light yeallow, redde, purple, blewe and greene’. Published in
Ravenna in 1586, De’ veri precetti della pittura by Giovanni Battista Armenini also reveals a lot about the Italian painting techniques of the time.
.
In 1601, Vidus Scarmilionius’ Latin treatise on colour contains
perhaps the first clear exposition of the three-primary red-yellowblue theory of colour mixing. Two other important texts on colour
appear in 1609: Anselm de Boodt’s Gemmarum et lapidum historia
(in Hanau) which also refers to the red-yellow-blue theory, as does
Louis Savot’s Nova de causis colorum sententia (in Paris). In 1611,
Sigfrid Forsius drew probably the first example not only of a colour
circle but also of a colour sphere in his manuscript Physica, in
which he attempted to analyse the ‘origin and relationship of the
perceived colours’. An astronomer and natural philosopher, he was
considered the most important writer in Sweden of his time, and
one of few who wrote in Swedish language. Marco Antonio Dominis, in his De radiis visus et lucis (1611), restated Aristotle’s observation that red, green and violet appeared to be the principal colours of the rainbow, and proposed that colours arise from the absorption of sunlight.
Sixteenth-century Mannerism
In 1550 the Tuscan painter, architect and writer Giorgio Vasari
published the first edition of Vite de’ piu eccellenti architetti, pittori et scultori italiani. The anthology includes invaluable information on artist’s lives, methods of working and artistic theories.
Vasari worked extensively as a decorative artist (notably in fresco,
with a workshop of assistants), as a portraitist and as a painter of
altarpieces. He also founded the first academy of art (in 1562).
Nicholas Hilliard (c. 1547-1619). English limner and goldsmith,
prominent at the court of Queen Elizabeth I. His short treatise on
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miniature painting, The Arte of Limning – commissioned by Richard Haydocke and inspired by Lomazzo – offers a rare opportunity
to learn about the methods of working of a British artist of his time
and the various materials used. On the subject of jewels, he states
that ‘there are besides white and black but five perfect colours in
the world, which I prove by the five principal precious stones bearing colour. These are the five stones: amethyst orient for murrey
[purple], ruby for red, sapphire for blue, emerald for green, and
hard orient topaz for yellow’. Hans Holbein was a major influence
on his portraiture.
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Nicholas Hilliard’s palette (about 1598): Flake White (White
Lead), Bone White, Shell White, Ceruse, Orpiment (yellow), Yellow Ochre, Massicot (Lead-tin Yellow), Saffron, Pink (yellow),
Gall-stone, Cologne Earth, Asphaltum, Raw Umber, Vermilion,
Red Lead, Murrey Lake, Indian Lake, Verdigris, Verditer (green),
Malachite Green, Sap Green (Pansy Green), Ceder Green (Chrysocolla), mixed greens (from Pink and Bice), Litmus Blue, Smalt
(copper glass), Indigo, Florey (Woad Blue), Genuine Ultramarine,
Ivory Black, Peach Black, Charcoal.
Reference: Nicholas Hilliard, The Arte of Limning (ed. Thornton &
Cain, 1992).
El Greco (Domenico Theotocopoulos, 1541-1614). Greek painter
working primarily in Spain. El Greco was perhaps the most assiduous follower of Titian’s manner. Whether an early interest in colour
was inspired by the Graeco-Roman mosaics of St Mark’s Cathedral, or by some Aegean basilica, is not known, but the classical
aspect of Titian’s alla prima colour-method appears to have had a
special attraction for him. He is one of the first artists to depict
himself holding a palette laid out in the ancient, tetrachrome manner. In a probable portrait of his son from about 1600, the artist also
holds a small, rectangular palette displaying black, Flake White,
Red Ochre, Yellow Ochre and Crimson. The highlights of draperies
in El Greco’s paintings appear to be under-painted with a mixture
of White Lead in oil and egg-tempera. The red, black and white of
the four-colour palette is evident in his flesh-tints, with Asphaltum
evident in the shadows. A greenish tinge in the flesh recalls the luminous greens in the shades of earlier Byzantine imagery. Over a
Red-brown ground he might under-paint in Yellow Ochre, black
and white, which tended to give bluish half-lights, greenish halftones and ‘cool-black’ darks, with ‘warm’ halftones provided by
the glowing through of the ground.
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El Greco’s possible palette (about 1600): Flake White (White
Lead), Yellow Ochre, Massicot (Lead-tin Yellow), Red Bole (Red
Ochre), Red Lake (Crimson), Earth Browns, Asphaltum, Raw Umber, Verdigris, Azurite Blue, Genuine Ultramarine, Charcoal Black.
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti, 1518-94). A prolific Venetian painter
who developed a predominantly tonal form of Mannerism during
the period of the Counter-Reformation. Tintoretto aimed as far as
possible to fuse the qualities of Titian’s colour and Michelangelo’s
draughtsmanship. One of his methods was to sketch a tonal study
in water-based paint, then to paint the local colours with oils. Black
and white, he held, were the most beautiful colours because black
gives force to the figures by making the shades deeper, while white
makes the highlights conspicuous. With a coldness characteristic of
Titian’s under-painting, the addition of a luminescent Emerald
Green, Biadetto Blue and Verzino Red, Oriental Pink, and unlimited glazing with Asphaltum, his work has an unearthly pallor that
seems to presage the so-called decline of the Venetian colourist
school.
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Tintoretto’s palette: Flake White (White Lead), Oriental Pink (yellow), Brazilwood Red (Verzino), Asphaltum (bitumen brown),
Emerald Green, Biadetto Blue, Ivory Black.
Hans Holbein (the Younger, 1497/98-1543). German painter and
printmaker, prominent at the Tudor Court in England after 1537. In
France in 1524 he perfected a three-colour (red, white and black)
pastel-chalk technique, later used for portrait-drawings.
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Hans Holbein’s palette (about 1530): Flake White (White Lead),
Yellow Ochre, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Brown Ochre, [?] Crimson Lake, Cinnabar (Natural Vermilion), Green Earth (Terre
Verte), Azurite Blue, Genuine Ultramarine, Ivory Black.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, 1480/85-1576). Prolific, innovative and
highly influential Venetian painter. A full appreciation of Titian’s
colour demands an acquaintance with Hellenistic painting of about
323-30 BC. It is impossible fully to appreciate any subsequent European colour technique without reference to his methods of painting, since his work demonstrates the continuity of the Greek tradition throughout the High Renaissance and Mannerist periods. Giovanni Bellini had learned the oil-painting method from Antonello
da Messina, and had passed it on to his pupils, including Giorgione
and Titian. When Titian worked in the Bellini studio, he probably
adopted their procedure of preparing panels with grey gesso, and
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inking in an outline drawing, over which a very thin chiaroscuro
was painted in brown oil-pigment (probably Umber or a shade
mixed from a dark ochre and Carmine). Titian later developed a
method of using translucent colour glazing, and admitted using up
to 40 glazes one over another. Giorgio Vasari observed that Titian’s paintings were ‘executed with bold strokes and dashed off
with a broad and even course sweep of the brush, in so much that
from near, little can be seen, but from a distance they appear perfect’. Palma Giovane also observed that ‘He laid down for his pictures a mass of colour which serves, so to speak, as a bed or foundation for what he was then to depict upon it’. Giovane continued
that ‘I myself have seen such vigorously applied under-painting in
pure red ochre, which was meant to give the half-tone, or in white
lead. With the same brush that he dipped in red, black or yellow, he
created the plastic effect of the light portions. With four strokes he
was capable of indicating a magnificent figure’. Titian’s medium (a
mixture of egg and oil) was probably first adopted for the speed
with which it would allow him to cover vast areas with apparently
rich, fat paint. It also permitted the finest delicacy of handling and
at the same time it gave a non-shiny surface ready to receive bituminous varnish rubbed on with fingers or with a rag. Above all, he
used the four earth-pigments spontaneously, sometimes beneath
glazes of the fullest colour-intensity. The principal authorities agree
that Titian’s under-paintings were generally ‘cold’, and that the
warmth came from his glazes. An exception was the treatment of
blue draperies, which were either deliberately under-laid with red,
in such a way as to allow the red to shine through in the shadows,
or were drawn in red so that there might be a glowing-through of
the red drawing. Otherwise, for the highlights of a fiery-red garment, the base was yellow-white, and for a ‘cold’ red light, an under-painting of whitish blue-grey. Another important glaze-colour
that Titian used, especially later in life, was Malachite Green. He
may also have used Ultramarine for the glazes of his more costly
commissions. His contact with graduates from Squarcione’s Academy probably made him aware that a dull blue could be mixed
from Vine Black and white, and Giovane actually mentions black
with yellow and red as the colour of the first lay-in. Titian himself
declared: ‘White, red, and black, these are all the colours that a
painter needs’, but ‘one must know how to use them’. Green and
blue are almost always subsidiary in his colour schemes, yet are
never absent because they are a necessary component in the skeletal coldness of the dead colouring, being derived from black mixed
with Yellow Ochre or white. The anonymous compiler of the
Segreti said that Titian and Veronese ‘used to impregnate their
canvases with water-colours only, and paint over that ground. This
custom has not a little contributed to render their pieces more lively
and bright, because the ground in water-colours draws and soaks
the oil off the colours, which must render them finer, as the greatest
cause of their dullness arises only from the oil, with which they are
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diluted’. Titian’s final great works show that in his last years Titian
he was content to paint with nothing more than the four classical
earth pigments.
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Titian’s palette (about 1560): Flake White (White Lead), Light Yellow (Naples Yellow), Massicot (Giallolino or Lead-tin Yellow),
Yellow Ochre, Orpiment (yellow), Burnt Orpiment, Vermilion, Realgar, Red Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Madder, Malachite Green, Copper
Resinate (foliage green), Verdigris, Green Earth (Terre Verte),
Popinjay Green, Titian blue (probably Azurite Blue), Ongaro (fugitive Copper Blue), Biadetto Blue, Genuine Ultramarine, Ivory
Black, Vine Black.
Reference: Don Pavey, Colour and Humanism (2003).
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). Tuscan sculptor, painter
and architect. Together with Titian, the most outstanding artist of
sixteenth-century Italy. In contrast to Leonardo da Vinci (died
1519), and even Raphael (died 1520), Michelangelo’s Sistine
Chapel frescoes suggest that he rejected their tonal modelling in
favour of greater the emphasis on the deepening of colour in shadows, a manner of working with colour that was evident in earlier
Italian painting. Early sketches exist which are derived from original works by Giotto and Masaccio. His major preoccupation was
centrally with the human figure, and its colouring would have made
him acutely aware of the usefulness of the classical, four-earth palette, which had been so ideally suited to the mixing of flesh-tints
for many centuries.
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Michelangelo’s palette: Chalk White (Gypsum White), Pumice
White, Yellow Ochre, Red Ochre, Vermilion, Light Red, Raw Sienna, Raw Umber, Cologne Earth (Vandyke Brown), Malachite
Green, Azurite Blue, Ivory Black, Lamp Black.
Albrecht Dürer (the Younger, 1471-1528). German painter and
printmaker. The greatest artist of the Northern European Renaissance, who absorbed and imported many of the perceptual and
technical developments of fifteenth-century Italian art. He learned
to paint in oil and watercolour in the studio of Michael Wolgemut,
and later, with Georg Schongauer, he perfected engraving techniques that would elevate printmaking as a significant expressive
medium as well as securing his own international reputation as a
superb and imaginative draughtsman.
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Albrecht Dürer’s palette: Flake White (White Lead), Yellow Ochre,
Vermilion, Venetian Red (Red Ochre), Crimson Lake, Burnt Umber, Genuine Ultramarine, Lamp Black.
Fifteenth-century Developments
Oil Painting
The use of drying oils, such as linseed oil and walnut-kernel oil, is
mentioned by Aetius as early as the fifth century CE. The medium
is also mentioned for use as a varnish in the Lucca Manuscript, but
not mixed with pigment for use as paint. The increasing popularity
of oil-painting throughout the fifteenth century was to give the panel painter a number of important new freedoms. Oil-paint, for example, was particularly suited to application on flexible canvas
stretched over large, lightweight supports. Among other obvious
advantages, compared to the existing techniques of egg-tempera,
fresco and encaustic painting, the oil medium allowed the painter to
maintain a brilliance of colour combined with deep colours in the
shadows. With oil, the painter could subtly blend colours, highlights and shadows, and also paint out large flat areas of colour,
especially as even, transparent glazes – a technique practically impossible with other existing media. The oil-painter could also
change his (or her) mind, and paint repeatedly over mistakes or
unwanted parts of a composition.
Oil paint consists of solid pigment particles mixed with a drying
oil. A drying oil is one which, when left exposed to air, will gradually thicken and solidify as a tough but flexible film. As the liquid
oil hardens, it absorbs oxygen from the air (by the process of oxidation) and forms a tough, leathery film known as linoxyn, which was
later manufactured commercially as linoleum or ‘lino’ floor covering. Initial oxidation is followed by polymerisation of the unsaturated fatty acids. The so-called drying process therefore involves
slow chemical changes that can continue indefinitely for many
years. With the addition of resins, such as amber, oil proved to be a
highly durable medium. (Non-drying oils, unsuited to painting, include the mineral oils and cooking oils, such as olive oil.)
Oils suitable for painting are extracted from the seeds of various
plants, most commonly the flax plant (which also gives linen), to
obtain so-called ‘cold-pressed’ linseed oil. In its natural form, it
takes a long time for cold-pressed oil to dry. The viscosity of the
standard linseed-oil medium can therefore be modified in various
ways. ‘Sun-thickened oil’ is exposed to sun for several weeks,
causing polymerisation (a change in grouping of molecules) rather
than the usual oxidation, which improves its drying performance
and gives a glossy finish. ‘Stand oil’ is oil thickened and polymerised in a vacuum (in a container without access to oxygen). This
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was a medium preferred, for example, by the early Dutch masters,
since it is highly durable but dries slowly and needs to be diluted
slightly (with turpentine) for painting. It can be boiled with a drying or oxidising agent (such as litharge or lead monoxide) to give
‘boiled oil’. Other useful drying oils include hemp-seed oil, lavender or spike oil (used by Leonardo), poppy-seed oil, safflower oil
(commonly used for whites), and walnut-kernel oil (used by Piero
della Francesca and Rubens).
Various liquids are necessary for thinning or diluting an oil medium. The term ‘volatile’ refers to such liquids as turpentine or white
spirit (mineral spirit) that readily evaporate (also making them
highly inflammable). Turpentine is extracted from the resin of coniferous trees, such as pine, spruce and larch.
In water-based paints, the ‘drying’ process involves the evaporation
of water (of refractive index 1.3) and its replacement by air (with a
lower refractive index of 1.0). Hence it is like the change that occurs in the appearance of a pavement or sidewalk as it dries: the
dried paint-layer reflects and scatters more light than it does when
wet, so that the end result (as in fresco) is a chalky appearance. The
refractive index of a typical oil medium (about 1.6) is much the
same whether ‘wet’ or ‘dry’, so that brilliance of colour and darkness of the shadows can usually be maintained. Oil-paint needs to
be painted over a primed ground, that is a support painted with a
sealer of some kind. This ‘primer’ stops the oil from sinking into
the canvas, so that the oil does not rot the canvas (and make it brittle), and so that the canvas does not absorb the oil and leave the
pigment unprotected on the surface of the painting.
In order to harden an oil-paint layer, and increase its durability, a
small amount of a resin can be added. This can also affect drying
time and the glossiness of a paint layer. The most common resins
(added in small quantities to an oil medium) include amber, a hard,
natural resin, fossilised from prehistoric trees (also known as succinite, and called electrum by the Greeks); copal is the modern
equivalent of amber. Rosin (colophony) and sandarac are two lightcoloured resins, and dammar (from a Malaysian tree) can be used
as a retouching varnish. Mastic (megilp or papoma) was responsible for cracking in the dark areas of many eighteenth-century paintings and is therefore best avoided.
According to Giorgio Vasari, Lorenzo di Credi (a fellow-pupil of
Leonardo in the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio) ‘made on his
palettes a great number of colour mixtures, so that they went gradually from the lightest tint to the darkest, with exaggerated and truly excessive regularity, so that sometimes he had twenty-five or
thirty on his palette, and for each of them he kept a separate brush.’
In a depiction of St Luke painting the Virgin Mary (1515), Niklaus
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Manuel Deutsch depicts the saint holding a palette in which there is
a thumbhole and which holds as many as 20 colours.
Fresco Painting
Fresco wall painting had been practised since antiquity. In the fifteenth century it experienced great popularity as numerous new
churches were built and decorated by the leading artists of the time
– notably Masaccio, Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca. Later
masterpieces include those by Raphael, Michelangelo and Annibale
Carracci, and fresco painting continued to be used extensively
throughout central and southern Italy until the beginning of the
seventeenth century, and even by twentieth-century artists in Mexico.
The binding medium of fresco is plaster or quicklime (calcium oxide). To prepare the plaster for painting, it is initially soaked or
‘slaked’ for some time in water, which changes its chemical composition to calcium hydroxide. In Italian, so-called buon fresco
simply means ‘true-fresh’, since a fresco painting is traditionally
applied directly to the wall to be decorated. The plaster dries by the
process of carbonation (absorbing carbon dioxide to form a hard
layer of insoluble calcium carbonate). The colours are embedded
within the plaster and so became part of the wall itself.
To prepare a wall for painting, the stone or brick face is first covered with a layer of rough plaster layer (the arriccio). Onto this a
rough sketch in charcoal is transferred from the ready prepared cartoon, drawn on thick paper and transferred by pricking through the
drawing along the outlines and then dusting usually with red powder. The dusting process is called ‘pouncing’, and the sketch (in dry
Red Earth or Sinoper) is called the sinopia. To prepare pigments
for fresco painting colours are ground in mortar and pestle, adding
distilled water to make a smooth paste. Powdered pigments ready
for use can be stored in containers containing limewater and then
mixed with the wet plaster and applied directly to the wall by
brush, hence there is little or no possibility for extensive overpainting. Paint must be applied while the plaster is still wet for the
appropriate chemical bonding to occur.
The intonaco represents the smooth and fine topmost layer of plaster. On to this an area large enough for a day’s work (literally a
giornata) is re-plastered over and the contours of the designs are
dusted (pounced) through with red Sinoper or charcoal dust. The
painter needs to be sure to get the picture right first time, as plastered areas (or pentimenti, literally meaning ‘repentance’) can only
be scraped off during to a period of about twelve hours after application. The artist needs to work as skilfully as possible, applying
powder pigments into the still-wet plaster. The painting always has
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to progress from top to bottom, to avoid splashing paint accidentally onto the completed sections. (A painter might spend a whole session painting a head in detail or else covering a much larger area of
sky or scenery in less detail.)
One can see from this description how a large-scale commission
would occupy a whole workshop, with apprentices kept busy in the
erection of scaffolding and platforms, plus the daily preparation of
plaster and pigments. Though the ‘structural’ colours might be rendered in buon fresco, the ‘ornamental’ colours may have been added a different medium, that is, tempera-size or egg-tempera. The
finished painting is left to dry and eventually burnished to give it a
slight sheen. The secco technique might also involve touching up
on top of the dried fresco painting.
Though it may seem a laborious method, compared to the relative
ease of using oil-painting, in its time fresco represented a quick and
economical way of covering large areas of walls and ceilings often
of awkward shapes and difficult locations where large tapestries or
wooden panels would have been difficult to install. If applied skilfully, the dried plaster will nor crack, and remains durable for several hundred (if not several thousand) years.
Fresco might well be considered the oldest of painting media, if we
consider that in the Old Stone Age (about 20,000 BCE), the CroMagnon painter would have mixed pigments with lime-water, high
in calcium content, which would have helped his earth pigments to
adhere to the interior surface of a cave. Fresco was practised in ancient Greece and Rome and elsewhere in ancient world, such as a
fresco from 1500 BCE at Santorine (Thira) in the Cyclades. It was
particularly popular in Italy from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, and used impressively by such artists as Giotto, Spinello,
Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Raphael. When it was suggested to Michelangelo that he paint the Sistine Chapel murals in
oil-paint, he declared that ‘oil-paint was for women and lazy artists,
but fresco was for men and true artists!’
In general, fresco painting did not travel well. North of the Apennines the climate was too damp for effective drying without the
growth of mould (hence the Venetians preference for oil, even for
very large works). Such a fate befell Leonardo’s Last Supper, in
Milan, which was ruined even in his own lifetime. A Victorian revival of interest came when two books were published giving details of earlier methods: Mary Merrifield’s The Art of Fresco Painting (1846) and Sir Charles Eastlake’s Materials for a History of
Painting (1847). Lime-resistant pigments suitable for fresco (and as
listed by Field in 1835 and Rood in 1879) include Pumice White,
Gypsum White, Yellow Ochre, Chrome Orange, Vermilion, Light
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Red, Indian Red, Raw Sienna, Raw Umber, Vandyke Brown, Emerald Green, Cobalt Blue, Ivory Black and Lamp Black.
The Early Renaissance
Painters in Florence conventionally belonged to the Guild of Doctors and Apothecaries, owing to their preoccupation with pigments
and paint media. In northern Italy, the Academy of Squarcione was
established for the express purpose of studying ancient Greek and
Roman art; and it may be that certain types of Greek painting are
reflected fairly accurately in the grey or brownish cast in the work
of Cosimo Tura or Carlo Crivelli. The solid but youthful male
nudes of the early Florentine school may be contrasted with the
mature, lusty flesh of the Venetian courtesans, depicted naked long
before such a practice was permissible in other parts of Italy.
It would be surprising if the students at the Academy failed to notice the application of the four-earth palette in surviving Roman
paintings and mosaics. Indeed, the origin of the traditional Renaissance under-painting, the abbozzo, probably originated from debased versions of tetrachrome modelling in which the four earthcolours were combined into a single, neutral shadow-colour, such
as the ‘dirty-green’ verdaccio used for under-painting and lay-ins.
The forms and faces of his figures were indicated precisely in outline over this, and the composition laid-in with verdaccio. The
flesh-tints consisted of Red Ochre (cinabrese) mixed with white in
various proportions. Such a practice was recommended by Cennino
Cennini, a Tuscan painter whose ‘book of the craft’, Il libro
dell’arte (written in the 1390s) was addressed to professional artists
of his time. Though no identifiable paintings by him survive, the
manual offers a detailed insight into his methods of working. From
it we learn that he favoured a basic palette of seven colours: Lime
White, yellow, red, green, two blues (Ultramarine and Azurite) and
black, and reserving white for the lightest highlights. The modelling of form started with the preparation of individual colours, rather than mixing together different hues, with white in the highlights. He would begin by isolating colours in separate bowls and
mixing into each progressively large amounts of white.
Leon Battista Alberti was probably the most important new source
of artistic theory in the first half of the fifteenth century. His Della
pittura was first published in Latin in 1434 (with an Italian translation the following year). The Renaissance study of colour in relation to art may be said to have begun with Alberti’s observation of
such phenomena as coloured reflections and complementary colours, or ‘colour friendships’ as he called them. Alberti, however,
gives only passing attention to colour, and concentrates more on
the Florentine tradition of adding colour to established chiaroscuro
lay-in: ‘I certainly agree that copiousness and variety of colours
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greatly add to the pleasure and fame of a painting’, he writes, ‘But I
should like the highest level of attainment in industry and art to
rest, as the learned maintain, on knowing how to use black and
white. It is worth all your study and diligence to know how to use
these well, because light and shade make things appear in relief’.
Hence colour was placed on an Aristotelian footing, and the darkto-light tonal scale given prime importance.
Alberti looked for the primary aesthetic colours not in the orthodox
colours of the Greek humours – white, yellow, red and black – but
in the Greek elements: the blue of the air, the green of the water,
the red of fire, and the grey and ashen colours of the earth. From
these, he said, it was possible, with the addition of black and white,
to mix countless subsidiary colours. Hence he promotes a primarycolour system consisting of black, white, red, green, blue and grey
(ash). Yellow is omitted perhaps because he calls yellow croceo
(saffron), rather than the more common giallo. He also stated: ‘It is
said that the antique painters Polygnotus and Timantes used only
four colours’, which most likely refers to Pliny listing the four
earths as those colours used by Apelles and other painters in antiquity. Alberti believed that, as shadow deepened, the colour became
duller, and that as the light increased, the colour became full and
clear. He therefore classed black and white as ‘alterations’ of colours.
In 1502, Speculum Lapidum was published – the first of a number
of printed books on the classification, appearance and astrological
significance of gemstones. Originally compiled by the Pisan physician Camillo Leonardi in the twelfth century, it was translated and
augmented as Mirror of Stones even as late as 1750. In 1652, the
English lapidary Thomas Nicols published his History of Pretious
Stones, with Cautions for the Undeceiving of All Those That Deal
with Pretious Stones. It was not until the seventeenth-century, in
Holland, that the first artists’ colourmen began offering ranges of
raw and manufactured pigments for sale. Long before then, commissions and contracts would often specify which pigments were to
be used by artists in an attempt to prevent the substitution of cheaper colours for more valuable ones, for example, the substitution of
Minium (Red Lead) for Genuine Vermilion, or Azurite for Genuine
Ultramarine (lapis lazuli), which at its finest was literally worth its
weight in gold. Indeed the English word ‘guarantee’ comes from
the Italian term garanza, referring to genuine madder dyestuff.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Italian artist and polymath. Leonardo had recommended that the artists’ studio should be decorated
with flesh-colour, not only to avoid unwanted coloured reflections
on flesh and draperies but more especially in order that actual
flesh-tones might be deepened and enhanced by reflections from
the walls. ‘The shadow of any colour’, he wrote, ‘must always par-
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ticipate of the colour of its object; and that in a greater or less degree, as the object has more or less light, and as it is nearer or further distant from the shadow’. Leonardo made an interesting and
important proviso, however, which may well give him the credit of
re-introducing the contrasting usage of reflected colour, though, in
point of fact, this is never obvious in his own surviving work. ‘A
painter’, he wrote, ‘must tinge the reflexes of his figures with the
colours of such parts of the drapery, as are nearest the carnations
[flesh-tints] on which these reflexes are thrown; always observing
that these reflected colours do not appear too vivid and distinct, unless where there is some particular reason for the contrary.’ He was
one of the first Florentines to adopt oil paint, and observed that the
‘true’ or local colour of a non-shiny surface (such as a face, hands
or clothing) is to be found in the highlight, and hence everything
else in the picture is progressively darker. He used the term sfumato
to describe the way in which he delicately blended highlights into
shadows. Because oil paint could remain in a liquid state for several hours, he was able to ‘soften’ edges between colours without
brushstrokes showing, ‘without lines or borders, in the manner of
smoke’. He was also aware of contrast effects and stated, ‘There is
another rule, by observing which, though you do not increase the
individual beauty of the colours, by bringing them together they
give each other additional grace, as when a green is placed near a
red, while the effect would be reversed if the green is placed near a
blue’. His surviving notes, collected and first published in 1641, are
full of acute observations of colour and form in nature which are
still just as valid today.
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Leonardo’s palette (about 1508): Flake White (White Lead), [?]
Naples Yellow, Massicot (Lead-tin Yellow), Yellow Ochre, Raw
Umber, Burnt Umber, Vermilion, [?] Carmine Lake, Venetian Red
(Red Ochre), Green Earth (Terre Verte), Burnt Terre Verte, Copper
Arsenate, Copper Resinate (foliage green), Azurite Blue, Genuine
Ultramarine, Lamp Black.
Reference: Leonardo da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting (1721). See
also Martin Kemp, The Science of Art (1990).
Jerome (Hieronymous) Bosch (died 1516). Flemish painter of
fantastic and moralistic religious images, working primarily for the
ducal courts of Burgundy. A close contemporary of Leonardo da
Vinci, he also adopted the oil-painting technique and exploited the
method of applying translucent glazes earlier perfected by Jan van
Eyck.
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Jerome Bosch’s palette: Flake White (White Lead), Massicot
(Lead-tin Yellow), Yellow Ochre, Vermilion, Red Lake, earth
browns, Malachite Green, Verdigris, Copper Resinate (foliage
green), Azurite Blue, Genuine Ultramarine, Ivory Black.
Piero della Francesca (1415/20-92). Tuscan painter and mathematician, first recorded in 1439 as assistant to Domenico Veneziano.
His principal medium is egg-tempera and hence his colouring is
usually light in tone and his forms sharply defined. Piero’s relatively few surviving paintings are a mixture of heraldry, iconography
and architectural decoration. Of the S. Francesco frescoes in Arezzo (painted in the 1460s), Kenneth Clark observed a difference between ‘decorative’ and ‘functional’ colour, but then hesitates to insist on this distinction because the structural painting is hardly less
decorative that the ‘decorative’ one, both approaches to colour having been conceived as decoration.
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Piero della Francesca’s palette: Flake White (White Lead), Yellow
Ochre, Orpiment (yellow), Massicot (Lead-tin Yellow), Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Vermilion, Cinnabar (Natural Vermilion), Sinoper (Red Earth), Red Lake, Verdigris, Verdaccio (earthy green
mixed from Chalk White, Yellow Ochre, Red Ochre and Vine
Black), Azurite Blue, Genuine Ultramarine, Turnsole (for dragée
colours), Vine Black, Lamp Black.
Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro, 1395/1400-55). Tuscan painter who
entered the Dominican order of Black Friars about 1420, following
early training as a painter and miniaturist. Significantly influenced
by Masaccio, he painted altapieces in egg-tempera and murals in
fresco (notably for S. Marco in Florence throughout the 1440s). At
his death was the most prominent painter in the city. Piero della
Francesca was probably one of his studio assistants, and, like Piero,
he would have used verdaccio, a ‘dirty green’ mixed from the four
earth-pigments, as his under-painting, which was then overlaid with
the more precious, mineral pigments, generally unmixed and
deepest in the shadow-areas, and cross-hatched with white for the
highlights.
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Fra Angelico’s palette: Flake White (White Lead), Yellow Ochre,
Orange Lead (mineral Sandarac), Vermilion, Red Ochre, Verdigris,
Malachite Green, Azurite Blue, Genuine Ultramarine, Vine Black,
Willow or Charcoal Black.
Jan van Eyck (died 1441). Netherlandish painter, working primarily in Bruges, who may have been trained as an illuminator of man-
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uscripts. He is and commonly credited with the invention of oil
painting. Working systematically with overlaid colour glazes on a
gesso ground, he evolved a detailed and remarkably realistic manner of depiction. Although his use of linear perspective is inconsistent, he was well aware of effects of colour perspective (later
discussed by Leonardo da Vinci). The architect Antonio Averlino
(known as Filarete) gives an account in 1450s of the oil painting
technique, and mentioning van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden.
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Jan van Eyck’s palette: Flake White (White Lead), Yellow Ochre,
Orpiment (yellow), Vermilion, Red Lake, Sinoper (Red Earth),
Madder Lake, Verdigris, Malachite Green, Green Earth (Terre
Verte, Copper Resinate (foliage green), Genuine Ultramarine,
Peach Black.
Giotto (Angiolotto di Bondone, died 1337). Florentine painter,
credited as the originator of a new method for depicting objects and
figures in pictorial space. More than any previous Italian painter, he
seems to invite the viewer into a scene as though he or she is a witness to it. This is achieved most obviously by imagining a fixed
light source high to the right or left of the picture-frame. The delicacy of fourteenth-century Florentine painting was attributable
partly to his new approach in handling egg-tempera in panelpainting, and of buon fresco in mural decoration. The serene intensity and luminosity of his panels are the result of various underpaintings, as well as the new appetite for what must have appeared
as an astounding realism. Cennino Cennini’s Libro dell’arte offers
a reliable account of the painting methods of his generation. On a
surface prepared with several layers of gesso, for example, the picture would have been outlined in charcoal and reinforced with a
precise pen drawing. This was toned with a mixed verdaccio and
shadows were strengthened with dark Green Earth. Highlights were
then fully modelled with white, and details of the facial and other
features indicated delicately with green. The lips and cheeks were
laid-in with bright Red Ochre, and the head and body was modelled
with three flesh-tones. The first, the lightest and most opaque, was
a pink made from white and a small amount of light Red Ochre or
cinabrese. The middle flesh-tone was mixed from equal parts of
white and the brilliant Red Ochre or Sinoper, while the darkest
flesh-tone, strongest in red pigment, would appear translucent, so
that the dirty-green under-painting could strike through. The highlights were loaded with almost pure white, and the darkest darks
were accentuated with red-black. Facial highlights were almost
white, with dark accents under the eyelids and upper lip delineated
with darkened Red Ochre. A blending of tones was achieved mainly by hatching, and the result of the process was cool but solid and
colourful painting.
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Giotto’s egg-tempera palette (about 1330): Flake White (White
Lead), Orpiment (yellow), Yellow Ochre, Massicot (Lead-tin Yellow), Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Sinoper (Red Earth), Red Ochre
(Cinabrese), Madder Lake, Veronese Green (Green Earth), Azurite
Blue, Genuine Ultramarine, Carbon Black.
Reference: Cennino Cennini, A Treatise on Painting (ed. Merrifield, 1844; ed. Herringham, 1899; ed. Thompson, 1933).