Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Johannes Vermeer: When painters were chemists + What is painting?

#1
C C Offline
He made masterpieces with manure
https://literaryreview.co.uk/he-made-mas...ith-manure

EXCERPT: [...] Before he laid down even a dot of paint, [Johannes] Vermeer would have weighed, ground, burned, sifted, heated, cooled, kneaded, washed, filtered, dried and oiled his colours. Some pigments – the rare ultramarine blue made from lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, for example – had to be plunged into cold vinegar. Others – such as lead white – needed to be kept in a hut filled with horse manure. The fumes caused the lead to corrode, creating flakes of white carbonate that were scraped off by hand.

Vermeer knew how to soak old leather gloves to extract ‘gluesize’, applied as a coating to artists’ canvas. Or he might have followed the recipe for goat glue in Cennino Cennini’s painters’ manual The Craftsman’s Handbook: boiled clippings of goat muzzles, feet, sinews and skin. This was best made in January or March, in ‘great cold or high winds’, to disperse the goaty smell.

An artist had to be a chemist – and he had to have a strong stomach. He would have known, writes Jelley, ‘the useful qualities of wine, ash, urine, and saliva’. [...] The art historian Jan Veth, writing in 1908 about Girl with a Pearl Earring (c 1665–7), fancied that Vermeer had painted with ‘the dust of crushed pearl’. Forensics have since revealed the earthier truth....

MORE: https://literaryreview.co.uk/he-made-mas...ith-manure



What is painting?
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/art...rr-tell-us

EXCERPT: [...] The latest writers to try to nail down the slippery nature of paint on canvas are Julian Bell and Andrew Marr. Bell’s What is Painting? first appeared in 1999 when, in an echo of Francis Fukuyama, it seemed that painting as well as history had finally had its day, vanquished by conceptualism and installation art. As it turned out, this ancient form was merely moribund and has come back to sprightly life. This new edition has been heavily revised so that Bell’s examination of what defines, links and changes the act of painting raises live questions.

Bell’s strengths as a writer on art are that he is a painter himself, and that he has both a wide historical frame of reference and an analytical mind. He quickly shows that the question of his title has no simple answer. While Leonardo claimed that “the first intention of the painter is to make a flat surface display a body as if modelled and separated from this plane”, Zola thought that a painting was rather “a corner of nature seen through a temperament”.

Bell points out that as the history of art has progressed so have the number of variables involved in what a painting might be. As each new concept is added, so the definition comes to resemble an equation of ever-increasing complexity...

MORE: https://literaryreview.co.uk/he-made-mas...ith-manure
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  How Renaissance Painting Smoldered with a Little Known Hallucinogen C C 0 452 Sep 24, 2017 01:54 AM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)