Painting technique (Translated)

By Vincent Tyler and David De Angelis

The techniques of painting embrace the practices necessary to give consistency and durability to paintings, and those guiding principles behind which the artist can transform coloring substances into elements suitable for the imitation of the lights and colors that cover natural things. This extension proceeds from the very organic structure of the singular structure of the painting, which imposes on the painter, for each act of the brush, the dual intent of the stability of the colors and their significant appearance, resistance and suitability of the technical means being linked in such an indissoluble way that they cannot be separated without the art itself disappearing; because, lacking resistance in the pictorial material against the infinite causes that tend in the course of time to alter it, it must necessarily destroy itself, just as, lacking the suitability of the means to achieve the reproduction of the truth, the work comes to place itself outside the orbit of art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stargatebook
• Release date: Sep 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9791220843935

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Preface

The techniques of painting embrace the practices necessary to give consistency and durability to paintings, and those guiding principles behind which the artist can transform colouring substances into elements suitable for the imitation of the lights and colours that cover natural things. This extension proceeds from the very organic structure of the singular structure of the painting, which imposes on the painter, for each act of the brush, the double intention of the stability of the colours and their significant appearance, resistance and suitability of the technical means being so indissolubly linked that they cannot be separated without the art itself disappearing; because, lacking resistance in the pictorial material against the infinite causes that tend in the course of time to alter it, it must necessarily destroy itself, just as, lacking the suitability of the means to achieve the reproduction of the truth, the work places itself outside the orbit of art. All the resistance that the colouring substances used will have to oppose to the action of time, since they can only come from their material composition: all the aspects that the colours themselves will assume in the mixtures made by the painter, since they can only depend on the way light works according to the molecular conditions of each colouring substance, it will happen that resistance and effect will be proportionate to the relationships maintained, on the one hand, with the natural laws that govern the phenomena dependent on the intimate constitution of the pictorial materials, on the other hand, with those that govern their various external appearances. Consequently, all the technical questions, whether they concern the conservation of the painting or the greater effectiveness of a method of arranging the colours, leave the field of individual appreciation or of taste, to subordinate themselves to the immutable principles that govern the material; And every material of art, however much it may have been transformed by the genius of an artist into an external cause of optical illusion, or by chemical refinements reduced to passivity by the actions of time, it is necessary that these effects should always be traced back to the properties of the concrete matter, for which the picturesque work exists plastically, and the dominion of the laws that govern everything that is perceptible in it returns. The techniques of painting therefore take their place among the positive knowledge of art and constitute its principal foundation, since art cannot be said to exist until the image conceived by the artist takes substantial form through suitable technical means; otherwise, on the basis of the mere capacity to imagine, everyone could call themselves a painter and at the same time declare themselves to be even greater than the greatest that they once were. The durability of the paintings is based on an intimate knowledge of the entire pictorial material, which is made up of a considerable quantity of mineral, vegetable and animal substances that require special handling and a predetermined support surface: dependent on the best use of colours on the widest understanding of the phenomena concerning light, it is obvious how the practices inherent in the preparation of this material and the norms that must guide its application to the work of art are affected by the stage of technical cultivation that informs an epoch, a school or an artistic personality, and whether it happens that a painting, kept in favourable conditions of conservation, and if it happens that a painting, kept in favourable conditions of preservation, deteriorates and ruins much earlier than the duration reached by more ancient works, this can only be ascribed to the bad material constitution, as well as to a bad understanding of the means of art, every failed pictorial effect is charged, especially when by others, in works and for similar purposes, it has been seen to obtain from the same means a more persuasive imitation of the true. This simple and spontaneous appreciation, to which any pictorial work lacking the requisites of durability and artistic merit must inevitably be subjected, includes a warning that it is very important to keep alive in the spirit of those who are about to embark on the path of art, namely, that no matter how badly the technical studies of a given era are reduced, the painter's work will never be exonerated of the defects it has with respect to material consistency and with respect to art, because in the same way that the entity of the damage of a colour that peels off a painting is not diminished by the reflection that the technical knowledge of the author or of his time could not be such as to foresee and provide for similar inconveniences, so in no way can a painting without artistic value be aesthetically prized, no matter how many considerations of time, place, means and intentions could be invoked in its favour. In addition to this inexorable condition imposed on the painter by the inescapable needs of his art, the artist has a moral obligation to provide for the longest possible preservation of his work, as a counterpart to the persistent public trust that never required from the artist any guarantee against the ungrateful and damaging surprises of technical neglect: a trust that was so often disappointed by the deterioration of paintings that had just come out of the author's hands and was continually offended by the lightness with which new painting ingredients and processes were adopted, deprived of any serious and proven experience. The complete abandonment of the preparation of all pictorial material in the hands of industry and the lack of consideration nowadays of the technical element in art judgments are only consequences of the current moment of technical studies, not new in the history of art nor an absolute obstacle to the formation of that technical criterion which in equally deplorable periods, was seen to produce illustrious works of art for their material solidity and inestimable value; but sufficient, however, to explain how a time even much shorter than that which has passed since the commercial intrusion, which dates from the end of the 18th century, is sufficient to make artists forget the necessary relationships between the future of their works and those materials on whose choice and method of use the result obtained depends exclusively. The inveterate habit of disregarding the obvious consequences of such a decadence of the techniques of painting, by claiming from the artists the already serious concern of pure art and from the amateurs and critics, with more foundation, the risk of meddling in what is seen as not cared for by the professors of art, should also lead to the erroneous opinion of dividing the work of art into two distinct elements; the means that serves to materially erect the painting and the art that would come to be as an abstraction of every technical impediment, but the sum of tendencies, of intuitions, of temperaments and of all the other causes of an intellectual order or refractory to a precise analysis, that can be considered concurrent in creating it. Here is not the place for a definition of art, but it is necessary to observe how a similar distinction of the pictorial work leads to the false concept of attributing to the colouring substances, which are not the only efficient means of the painting, the immediate property of analogy with the aspects of the real, while they are not behave in artistic imitation if not transformed by the mixtures, glazes, juxtapositions and contrasts, without which the colours cannot be considered as elements of art; no absolute analogy presenting them with the images of natural things, nor being able to conceive anything more shocking to the sense of truth, than the application, for itself, of any colouring substance, as it is supplied by nature or administered by industry, as a complement of illusion to the drawing of any object of truth. But however much the appreciation of painting may be held to be independent of the relative technical knowledge, it remains no less a particular condition of the art of painting to be distinguished from its sister arts by a more intrinsic link between the material from which it takes its existence and its final expression. Since every other plastic art assumes something concrete from the external world, capable, if not of initiating ideas of beauty, then sufficient to draw attention to itself as a sensitive body, with the properties of occupying space in height, width and depth: to make a more or less active obstacle to light through recesses or protrusions; and through the play of light and shadow, independently of any art formula, but according to the behaviour of real objects, to offer new elements of true consistency, like sculpture and architecture. A piece of clay, a stone, is indeed little, but nevertheless it constitutes a base, an embryo, a starting point for comparison, which facilitates imitation. For the painter none of this; his vision, on the contrary, cannot take on the appearance of reality unless it contradicts the principles of relief, because, constrained on a flat surface, it must represent at various distances points, lines or forms materially placed in the most unlikely way. To this difficulty, if we add that of the indeterminate sensation of the colours of reality in contrast with the visible substance of the colouring materials, it is easy to see how the similarity of the pictorial image with reality can be compromised even by its schematic outline, not because of the uncertainty of the artist's vision or his inability to compare the reality with the painted image, but more simply and more commonly because of the lack of a criterion of use, of the vast and complex way of using the technical material; delimited, yes, in the invariable surface of the colours, and in the number of colours and solvents necessary; but susceptible, however, to being transformed into as many pictorial images as human genius and the infinite aspect of nature can ever suggest. Technique and art are thus shown to be linked by the closest of bonds. And pictorial art of what ever, where the effect of lights and colours is lacking; and technique in what could matter to the artist if it were not for my vain handling of colours and solvents. Art begins only where there begins to exist an expressive image and a technical sufficiency to transform the inert product of material colours into the appearance of true lights and colours, so that it is reasonably argued that the impotence to dominate the pictorial material is in fact equivalent to the lack of the informing idea, since nothing can be obtained from a technical means that is incapable of arousing the impression one wishes to produce. All the optical effects that arise from a painting can have no other origin than the intrinsic qualities of the technical means used, since it is not possible to see colour where everything is dull, nor light where it appears black. If, however, the impressions aroused by the various aids of art change through the intervention and contrast of colours and distance, it will always be necessary that the meaning assumed by the material ingredient be in relation to the technical criterion from which it comes, and respond, as has already been said, to recognised properties of the means employed, since no interesting result can be conceived where the intelligence of the application and the suitability to arouse certain sensations are lacking. This explains the unrestrainable instinct of artists, and of the connoisseurs of art, to approach the canvases in order to study, from the traces left by the brush, the intellectual and mechanical process that guided it. From a few palms of canvas, as long as the most salient features of the material means of an artist can be understood, his whole pictorial personality emerges, just as for the anatomist a phalanx of a finger is enough to reconstruct the individual to which it belonged: it is a question of studying this technical anatomy. In the memoirs of the old masters and in the writings of the technicians of their age, there is no mention of the doubt of considering the use of pictorial material as the privilege of an arcane science enclosed in mysterious formulas, or rather dependent on these formulas, which is the most common error and one could say the dearest hope of the novices in art.

This attribution to unknown processes, to indecipherable mechanics proper to distant times, to singular men barely known by their works and disappeared together with their secrets; that good-natured confession of being unable to attain the expression, the beauty and the truth that radiates from the technicality of the creations of the masters, thus exchanging the effect for the cause; that power almost to say: you also Raphael, you also Titian, if you lived in our obscurity of technical findings, you would be our companions in misfortune, is one of the phenomena typical of the present period of our artistic education. All historians and biographers agree in asserting that Titian returned to his sketches many times for a very long time and that his superimpositions of colours and the mastery of those decisive touches that resolve the work and give the illusion of a work that came out of the blue and as preserved as if it had come out of the master's hands yesterday are only the summary of the intense and persevering observation of the truth and of the laborious elaboration of the brush that alone lead to the sublime heights of art. And yet for this great art of his, if it does not happen to hear him exchanged with the greatest practitioners of the trade, it is always a tacit understanding that attributes procedures known only to him and with him buried forever. And mysterious mixtures were believed to be those used by Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto in gigantic works conducted among cohorts of disciples and assistants, who knew how to imitate everything from the masters, except for the boundless power of genius; the only enigma that they truly left unsolved for posterity. Is the gloss of the frescoes of the times of the most diligent pictorial practices and the most impenetrable secrets still a mystery, that of the tempera of the Quattrocento painters! How many occult things the ancient painters must have known, and how to hide and whisper their mysteries in each other's ears, if none of this has ever leaked out to any layman, so that a note, a memory, a letter to a friend, to a protector, to an acquaintance, hints at that anguish which must be for the artist when he cannot bring his own idea to life, and the ineffable joy of having conquered some notion essential to his art. The gloomy air that surrounded the slandered memory of Andrea del Castagno was nothing but an invention of the Romantics of the techniques of painting, perhaps not seeming natural that among so many mysteries and secrets was missing a dagger and a corpse. But the diffusion of the discovery of Giovanni Van Eych, just as he did not draw other weapons from the sheath than the dialectical pins, so he left the cabal dozing among the syringes and the stoves of the necromancers, who never gave colours, oils and varnishes to the painters. Without affirming that all the ancient masters knew these secrets and that the technical teachings did not suffer from the jealous nature of some schoolmaster, whatever interpretation one gives to the passage by Armenini that describes in gloomy colours the great difficulties for the young people of his time to master all the practices inherent in painting, almost portraying the perplexity and discouragement of the youth of today, as those arrested on the way to the ultimate regions of the art of the obstacle of techniques, therefore nothing emerges from the teachings of his True Precepts of Painting, other than the sole persuasion of having to know the general mode of functioning of the material of painting. Where, then, did the masters of art derive that knowledge from which their works remain an example and guide to modern research, in the generality of their methods and in their application to so many individual cases? The concept of the artistic education of the best times of art was so rightly understood by Muntz that it could not be better expressed if not by quoting his own words [1]: One of the most characteristic facts of the History of the Arts in that era, and especially in Florence, is to see that most of the famous artists, Bramante, Donatello, Ghiberti, Ghirlandaio and many others practiced in some goldsmith's workshop. This is explained by the fact that the goldsmith was obliged, like those of the Middle Ages, to know the theory and practice of all the arts, since he gradually had to practice all of them on a small scale, in order to model and decorate the chalices, the candelabra, the reliquaries and the other various works of church goldsmithery and tableware that he was called upon to execute. The goldsmith worked as an architect when he fashioned niches, pillars, windows and pediments; as a sculptor when he chiselled small figures and ornaments; as a painter when he arranged enamels intended to bring out the beauty of form with the richness of colour, and as an engraver when he worked gold and silver with a burin. Since he had to use the most diverse materials, he was forced to know how to hammer iron, cast bronze, as well as how to reweld and clean the metal work coming from the anvil or taken from the form. It is well understood that with such extensive knowledge the Renaissance goldsmith was the most capable of giving his pupils an education that would allow them to embrace any branch of art without fear of failing; he was considered a master par excellence, because the best architects, sculptors and painters of the time had come out of his workshops. These, having learned during their apprenticeship to handle materials whose nature does not involve hasty work, had contracted there those habits of precision and patience, the results of which are manifested in the masterpieces that are the pride of the museums and private collections of our time. The most salient character, undoubtedly, of the education of the Quattrocentisti is their universality. In no other epoch in the history of art do we find such encyclopedic organizations in the true sense of the word, cultivating the most disparate branches and succeeding in excellence in everything, great architects, great sculptors and great painters at the same time; sometimes even great scholars or great poets, like Alberti, Leonardo, Michelangelo. That universality which was already affirmed in the thirteenth century (Nicola, Giovanni and Andrea Pisano were sculptors and architects; Giotto was a painter and architect; Orcagna was a painter, architect and sculptor) depends, if I am not mistaken, on the teachings of antiquity, on that truly scientific method which had the advantage of opening the mind, of giving the key to an infinity of problems, of making their followers equally capable of any intellectual work by virtue of the critical force which it instilled in them. Masters of this secret, the Italians, instead of wasting time on useless details, went straight to the goal. But together with the technical criterion, which was strengthened more by the practical exercise and knowledge of the material pertaining to the three arts, than by the aid of written texts, there was also a requirement of the old masters and the old schools an exact perception of the obligations and sacrifices that the future of their work imposed on themselves and others, in addition to the apprenticeship that tempered the physical and moral energy to conquer the power to govern the technical material, subjecting it to the dominion of the spirit, shaping it, enslaving it to one's own organism, so as to come out transformed, conquered, indeed a spontaneous emanation of the spirit itself. The further back one goes in the historical periods of art, the more the feeling of providing for the durability of works appears congenital with the faculty of creating them, and marvellous, because the foundation of long experience is missing. If it were possible to compare the innumerable quantity of mediocre or bad works that have disappeared for reasons inherent in their material constitution with those of the masters that have been preserved in good condition up to the present day, one would have to detect a constant relationship between the means used to make the artist's idea perceptible and the value of the idea itself. In other words, one wants to assert that the possession of the necessary practices for the good use of pictorial materials is proportionate to the power of creating true works of art. This opinion, which can be arrived at by other means than the ineffective comparison assumed, ceases to be reliable if by the possession of the materials of painting is meant the perfect mastery of them. The genius of Leonardo flies with a different wing than the measured pen of Piero della Francesca, without however surpassing him in the solidity of the technical process, which would seem to contradict the assertion made; but the truth becomes evident when one considers the other with their respective techniques in the ranks of disciples and imitators. Thus, later, the damage done to the clarity of the paintings by the imprimiture of the caracceschi, and by the deliquescence of the asphalt of the tenebristi do not go so far as to destroy the brightness of the luminous parts of the paintings of Annibale or Tintoretto, just as at the beginning of the 19th century the excessive use of oil in the paintings of Appiani and Sabbatelli is also mixed with technical virtues unknown to the innumerable crowd of nameless painters of the same age. In truth, the assortment of pictorial ingredients that the artist finds at hand is purified by the scrutiny of the most intense, most complex work of the creative mind aware of having to live on in posterity, aware of the greater sacrifice imposed on those who aspire to greater merit, greedy also of those studies that, not proceeding laterally in the search for beauty, cannot be assimilated by genius itself without the latter, often descending from the regions of the imagination, deviating his eyes from the marvels of expressive nature, patiently, perseveringly searching for deeper dependencies between his own work and the truth that is his guide: open to all those improvements that overcome the obstacle, so great in the plastic arts, of capturing even in a sketch the fleeting aspects of movement and passion; vigilant of the experience of others and mindful of the results of his own, constant in heroically fighting the eternal struggle of art with time, which inexorably spreads its dark veil where precisely the virtue of the painter shows itself weakest, in the splendour of the lights and the transparency of the shadows, the supreme difficulties and victories of the art of colouring. The basis of the technical criterion is the constant simplification that each painter introduces in his technical means with the progressive exercise of his art, and before the tradition that attributes to Titian the merit of obtaining from only five colours the richness of his extraordinary colouring, Lorenzo di Credi [2] was the subject of criticism, who kept twenty-five to thirty tints prepared, and Amico Aspertini [3] was considered ridiculous, girded to the teeth with pots and piñatas full of colour; and since man's nature is susceptible to all excesses, it can be seen in passing that the love of simplicity still maintains, among artists, followers of the chimerical theory of the three fundamental colours, a real waste of time for not succeeding in practice in extracting from yellow, blue and red, with the aid of white and black, all the possible gradations of hues. The beginner, who is unaware of the results of mixing colours by addition or absorption of light, overloads his palette with as many colours as industry produces, in the hope of more easily grasping the effects of the colours of the real thing or of having their components suggested to him. Unknown to him is the marvellous physical-anatomical work of the artist at the moment of each stroke of the brush, the observation and the memory of the object he wants to portray, the choice of colours to quickly obtain the desired tone, the precision of the quantity of each colour to be captured with a stroke measured from the palette, taking into account even the remnants of the previous colour left on the tip of the brush, without even thinking of looking at it; the addition of varnishes, essences, oils, if necessary, and finally the frank brushstroke like the blow of a hammer or light as the velvet of a feather, flowing, insinuating itself into the difficult modelling of a face and into the most varied accidentalities of the rough plane of the sketch. How much ground to cover, how many obstacles to overcome, how much waste of materials and effort separates the hand that has almost identified itself with the brush and the arm that directs it, and the visible clumsiness of the inexperienced painter to whom the brush even falls out of his hand, or dips heavily into an opposite colour, making now too intense, now too pale the hue, now too bright, now too light, now making the colour too intense, now too pale, which, hesitant, tired, disheartened, risks on the canvas the beginning or continuation of a false colour, which will inevitably lead to other neighbouring colours that are even further from the truth and destined to imminent alterations, which the forgotten precautions for the durability of the work will lead to pitiful ruin.

But this period which all militants of art have passed through under the hail of scholastic awards is invariably followed by a frenzy of technical