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16th-Century Renaissance Pigments and Painting Techniques

Venetian colore, or colour, is admired for its sheer brilliance and bravado. Artists, calledfigurers, were part of a larger industry of colour that thrived in Venice. Dyers, glassmakers, tailors, and decorators of furniture and ceramics all employed bright colors. Within the industry of colour, shopkeepers--vendecolori--emerged as specialists. Today nosotros would phone call them colormen: their profession evolved first in Venice, where they were trading past the end of the 15th century. They offered a panoply of materials for the color industry, including raw materials for colorant and dye industry, glassmaking, and prepared pigments. They dabbled in international merchandise and offered many imported colors in addition to ones prepared locally. Their inventories listing azurite, orpiment, and vermilion, among many other items.

The range of materials at the vendecolori was notable for its breadth. The vendecolori sold materials of the highest quality and appear to have been in the position of offer highly refined and purified colorants. At the vendecolori, artists could larn materials of all sorts; some were intended for other trades, merely could be used by oil painters. Among these were the glassy pigments made for the majolica and glassware decorators, and the pigments used by manuscript illuminators. The set availability of these at the vendecolori increased the gamut of colors available to artists and the range of backdrop of new materials facilitated experimentation with coloristic furnishings.

Giorgione's painting is typified past the exquisite brushwork he used to depict both colour and texture. The quality and distinction of his painting was achieved through his command of the oil medium and his use of colorants of exceptional quality that could be obtained at color sellers in Venice. His paint was applied in few, thin layers. A cantankerous-department from the Virgin'southward mantle shows how he painted a layer of pure, deep red every bit an underlayer to farther warm and enrich the hue of the ultramarine blue of the cloak. The luminescence of the red paint is enhanced by the improver of a finely ground glass.

Giovanni Bellini and Titian, The Feast of the Gods, 1514/1529, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Widener Collection, 1942.9.1

Giovanni Bellini was an innovative painter throughout the length of his career. He adopted materials and colors that non only enriched but also defined the Venetian palette, such as indigo, the pair of pigments orpiment and realgar, and lavish use of the deep green, copper resinate. In Banquet of the Gods, Bellini painted Silenus' orangish robe with orpiment mixed with a transparent ruby-red lake pigment.

Bellini mixed a little orange glassy material of the sort used by ceramic decorators into azurite to achieve the perfect hue for suggesting hills at the horizon in the far distance.

A consummate colorist, Bellini added transparent crimson pigment into green copper resinate glaze to mute the strident intensity of its tone and to strike just the right colour for Priapus' tunic.

The x-radiograph of the painting shows that Bellini painted the trees and added the mural around them. The infrared radiograph suggests the trunks and some of the branches were outlined in nighttime pigment. The gods and nymphs were not outlined this style, all the same the complexity of the composition seems to demand that in that location was some underdrawing. The sweep of a brush loaded with oil pigment pulls up charcoal drawings, then perhaps Bellini, anticipating later writers' description of how to pigment, dusted off his drawing every bit he painted. One sample shows a trace of underdrawing, just a few specks of black, lying on a sparse white atomic number 82 priming which is over the gesso on the canvas.

For more information on The Feast of the Gods: David Bull and Joyce Plesters,"The Banquet of the Gods: Conservation, Examination, and Estimation." Vol. twoscore, Studies in the History of Art Monograph Series II. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1990.

For more information on the vendecolori: Barbara H. Berrie and Louisa C. Matthew, "Venetian Colore: Artists at the Intersection of Technology and History," in Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, edited by D. A. Brown and Southward. Ferino-Pagden, Washington and Vienna: National Gallery of Art and Kunsthistorisches Museum, 2006.

Barbara H. Berrie and Louisa C.  Matthew, "Material Innovation and Artistic Invention: New Materials and New Colors in Renaissance Venetian Paintings," in Scientific Examination of Art: Modern Techniques in Conservation and Assay. Washington: National Academy Press, 2005.

Louisa C. Matthew and Barbara H. Berrie, "'Memoria de colori che bisognino torre a vinetia': Venice as a Eye for the Buy of Painters' Colours," in Trade in Artists' Materials: Markets and Commerce in Europe to 1700, edited by J. Kirby, Due south. Nash and J. Cannon. London: Archetype, 2010.

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