Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [51]
Everything takes a long time, much waiting and great patience. Of course, as with the preparatory stage, these obstacles provoke forethought, no bad thing for painters, a thoughtless tribe as a rule. They also produce a high palette, and the light colors of the early Renaissance, with a good deal of white or near white, appeal strongly to many people. On the other hand, the range of colors is narrow and they become tedious in consequence, particularly since they are not mixed or overlaid while painting. This limitation is underlined by the small size of the early Renaissance palette, little more than a narrow oblong, compared to the huge palettes that appeared in the second half of the sixteenth century, when painting with oil had taken over more or less completely. Moreover, not only is the range narrow; the lower, darker tonalities and colors are excluded. Chiaroscuro is ruled out; so is the sfumato that Leonardo da Vinci exploited so effectively once he took to oil.
Tempera, then, is not just a different medium from oil, but an inferior one, and it is a fact that, once it passed out of general use, attempts to revive it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have never succeeded for long. We come, then, to another central paradox of the Renaissance. Just as, in writing, the most important event of the Renaissance—printing by movable type—was a non-Italian invention, which came from Germany, so in painting, the most welcome technical change of the Renaissance, the adoption of oil for painting, was also a non-Italian development, which came from the Low Countries. (Indeed, you could say that both these discoveries undermine the concept of the Renaissance, since neither was known to antiquity.) We do not get the first reference to mixing pigments with oil until the manual of Theophilus, De diversis artibus, of 1110–40. Walnut oil or linseed oil was used, and it took an unconscionably long time to dry, as Theophilus complained. The Norwegians used it for altarpieces in the thirteenth century, and they decorated their wooden statues with oil paint. Cennini (1390) sees it as a German method.
However, it was the painters in the Low Countries who took it up in a highly professional way and improved on the process steadily. By the fifteenth century it was their usual method for painting on panel, and they were beginning to use it on walls too. They quickly discovered that, if you were careful and placed successive layers of thin oil paint on a detailed underdrawing, you could achieve effects of great translucency and depth, as with stained glass. Indeed, the early oil painters were often glass artists too and learned how to achieve the same glowing effects of church windows on opaque wood surfaces. Dirk Bouts (1415–75) habitually used five layers of thin paint, sometimes more. His contemporary Jan van Eyck (active 1422–41) achieved results that staggered visitors who had never seen oil employed as a medium—detail, brilliance, sensitivity, great depth and completely new ways of depicting the existence and fall of light. Vasari, writing a hundred years later, was so impressed by van Eyck’s mastery of the medium that he wrongly credited him with inventing it.
Unlike printing, however, painting in oil took a long time to reach Italy and even longer to be generally adopted. Antonello da Messina, a much-traveled painter, is credited with being the first Italian to take it up, and he certainly showed specimens during a visit to Venice in 1475–76. In central Italy, Perugino was using a mixture of oil and tempera in the 1480s, switching entirely to oil during the 1490s. Venice was the first city school of art to take to oil enthusiastically, and it had lasting effects. It is certainly not true that the Venetians paid little attention to drawing—the