Venetian glass, Venetian painting

While sifting through 15th- and 16th-century documents at the state archives in Venice, Louisa Matthew came across an ancient inventory from a Venetian seller of artist's pigments. The dusty sheet of paper, dated 1534, was buried in a volume of inventories of deceased persons' estates. . .

This inventory of artists' materials could hold the answer to a question that had long vexed conservation scientists: How did Venetian Renaissance painters create the strong, clear, and bright colors that make objects and figures in their paintings appear to glow?

The diversity of items on the list amazed Matthew. It included not only painters' pigments such as azurite, vermilion, and orpiment, but also raw materials used in a variety of crafts. "So, it wasn't just the painters who were buying from the color seller," she says. Glassmakers and dye-makers were also frequenting the shop. If the color shop was a nexus for all these different craftspersons, she reasoned, "maybe they were sharing ideas"—and materials too.

Sure enough, there is quite a bit of glass incorporated in contemporary Venetian paintings. What I find a bit surprising, though, is that this hadn't been noted before -- or had it? Nonspecialist articles like this often fail to make clear what is an entirely new discovery and what is a refinement of something already known in outline.

Mixing glass with paint may have served a non-aesthetic purpose as well. Marika Spring, a conservation scientist at the National Gallery of London, has found glass in several works by two other Italian Renaissance painters—Perugino and Raphael—who mixed powdered colorless glass with red lake pigments and many others.

Rather than enhancing the colors, the glass likely functioned as a desiccant, or drying agent, Spring says. . .

The transparency of the glass may also have been important, she notes. The red-lake pigments were already quite transparent. It would have made sense for painters to choose a transparent drying agent, such as colorless glass, to preserve the transparent quality of the paint, says Spring.

In Perugia, Italy, at a workshop in 2003 on Perugino's painting technique, Spring ran into several other conservation scientists who have found powdered colorless glass in 15th- and 16th-century Italian paintings.

Full story here.

Posted by David on March 13, 2005 9:07 AM