Monday, July 12, 2021

Durable Pigments (Renaissance, Mannerist, Baroque)

Rogier van der Weyden
The Descent from the Cross
ca. 1435
oil on panel
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Petrus Christus
The Lamentation
ca. 1455-60
oil on panel
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

Hugo van der Goes
Adoration of the Magi
ca. 1470
oil on panel
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

attributed to Giovanni di Pietro (Lo Spagna)
Agony in the Garden
ca. 1500-1505
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

Jan Gossaert
Adoration of the Magi
ca. 1510-15
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

Albrecht Dürer
Adoration of the Trinity
(Landauer Altarpiece)
1511
oil on panel
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Paolo Morando (il Cavazzola)
The Deposition and Lamentation
1517
oil on panel
Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona

Pontormo (Jacopo Carrucci)
The Visitation
1528-29
oil on panel
Pieve di San Michele Arcangelo, Carmignano

Andrea del Sarto
Pietà with Saints
ca. 1523-24
oil on panel
Palazzo Pitti, Florence

Michele Parrasio
Allegory of the Infante's Birth
ca. 1575
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Giovanni Lanfranco
Salvator Mundi
ca. 1610-20
oil on canvas
Galleria Nazionale di Parma

Jacob Jordaens after Peter Paul Rubens
Flight of Lot and His Family from Sodom
ca. 1618-20
oil on canvas
National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo

workshop of Simon Vouet
The Entombment
ca. 1635-38
oil on panel
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

Giovanni Francesco Romanelli
Venus Pouring Balm on the Wound of Aeneas
before 1650
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Giovanni Battista Gaulli (il Baciccio)
Portrait of Cardinal Giovan Francesco Ginetti
ca. 1685
oil on canvas
Fondazione Cavallini Sgarbi, Ferrara

"Time and the cost of materials played an important role in the production of paintings.  In many cases the making of durable paints was a time-consuming process and the use of expensive and colorfast pigments could raise the price of a painting above the acceptable."  

"There would have been extremely expensive paintings that had been worked on for a very long time and involved the honor of both the painter and the patron."

"Paintings that had not (markedly) discolored within a few decades were apparently considered to be especially durable.  So when authors state that a particular color would last an extremely long time, or eternally or forever, they are in fact referring to a period of just several decades."

"One of the few remarks where a painter referred to preservation over centuries is found in the correspondence between Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and Jacob Heller.  Heller, a rich textile merchant, had asked Dürer to make an expensive altarpiece depicting The Ascension and Coronation of the Blessed Virgin (1507-09).  While he was working on the altarpiece, Dürer informed Heller that he was only using the best pigments for the altarpiece and was taking the greatest possible care with the painting.  Dürer guaranteed that these methods would ensure that the altarpiece's middle panel would still be pure and fresh of color in five hundred years' time."   

– Margriet van Eikema Hommes, from Changing Pictures: Discolouration in 15th to 17th Century Oil Painting (London: Archetype Books, 2004)

"When I buy colors, it is by the mere sight of their names.  The name of the color (Indian yellow, Persian red, celadon green) outlines a kind of generic region within which the exact, special effect of the color is unforeseeable; the name is then the promise of a pleasure, the program of an operation; there is always a certain future in the complete names.  Similarly, when I say that a word is beautiful, when I use it because I like it, it is never by virtue of its sonorous charm or of the originality of its meaning, or of a "poetic" combination of the two.  The word transports me because of the notion that I am going to do something with it: it is the thrill of a future praxis, something like an appetite.  This desire makes the entire motionless chart of language vibrate."

– from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (Hill & Wang, 1977)