Tempera painting

“ Recently there has been a revival of tempera painting, and a group of painters are producing works on panel and canvas painted in tempera or fresco secco, with yolk of egg as a medium, according to the practice of the early Italian painters and the directions of Cennino Cennini. A pure luminous quality of colour is produced, valuable in mural decoration and also durable, especially under varnish. ”

“ Strictly speaking any medium mixed with pigments makes the process one ‘a tempera.’ Many substances may be thus used, some soluble in water, as size, gum, honey, and the like; others insoluble in water, such as drying oils, varnishes, resins, etc., while the inside of an egg which is in great part oleaginous may have a place between. It is not the usage however to apply the term ‘tempera’ to drying oils or varnishes, and a distinction is always made between ‘tempera painting’ and ‘oil painting.’ See Note on ‘Tempera Painting,’ postea, p. ”

“ The latter size, with or without the addition of fig-tree juice, was chiefly used in the painting of the figure subjects and pictorial work, while size made from cuttings of parchment, by boiling them, or from ordinary glue, was used for the larger surface colouring. The general medium of the work was therefore tempera, or distemper, though sometimes, but rarely, oil was mixed with the colours. Pictorial and ornamental paintings on the screens were varnished with an oil varnish over the tempera painting, but in many instances such paintings were left unvarnished. ”

“ Berger, in his Beiträge zur Entwicklungs-Geschichte der Maltechnik, an unfinished work that has already run to a thousand pages, goes elaborately into the subject, but has to admit that many points are still doubtful. It makes comparatively little difference what particular medium is used in tempera painting, but it is of great importance to decide whether a particular class of work is in tempera or in fresco. ”

“ A chapter on colouring in mural pictures leads on to the account of the fresco process. As Vasari was in this an expert, his description and appreciation of the process form one of the most valuable parts of the treatise. He is enthusiastic in his praise of the method, which he calls the most masterly and most beautiful of all, on account of its directness and rapidity. Tempera painting on panel or on dry plaster is next discussed, and then follows a notice of oil painting on panel or canvas. ”

“ PIGMENTS
The question of the medium in which the painter shall execute his pictures is an affair of temperament. Each artist must consult his own feelings in this matter and select the medium which is to him the most sympathetic. To-day, there are practically but three systems of painting in common use, tempera having gone out of vogue, and fresco having very wisely been discarded in favor of better and sounder methods. The three remaining methods are, of course, pastel, water-color, and oil. ”

“ After this has been allowed to dry for a few days, it may be varnished with a number of varnishes, which I will describe later on, when it has all the appearance of an oil painting. There are such a large number of tempera [Pg 36] tube colors made that it is unnecessary for the artist to make his own. Tempera Colors do not change, excepting, of course, those which are inherently defective, and it is unfortunate that in looking over the list of Tempera Colors for sale, Aniline Lakes should be manufactured and sold at all. ”

“ Tempera is also called in Italy fresco a secco, as distinguished from fresco buono, or true fresco, painted on freshly laid patches of stucco. Various media have been used for tempera work, such as the glutinous sap of the fig and other trees, various gums which are soluble in water, and size made by boiling down fish-bones, parchment and animals' hoofs. A mixture of egg and vinegar has also been found to make a good medium, especially when it is desirable to apply the colours in considerable body or impasto. For the nature and history of painting in tempera and fresco, see Painting. ”

“ Tempera [22] is the old name for any vehicle used in painting. The two great divisions of painting in the Middle Ages were fresco and secco; shortly put "fresco," meaning the painting on walls when the plaster was wet; "secco," the painting when it was dry. In fresco painting no vehicle was used but water; in secco painting a tempera was used composed of white and yolk of egg. Thus, in Cennino Cennini's Treatise on Painting, written in 1437, [23] he says:—"Two sorts are good, but one is 29 better than the other. ”

“ If the painter in tempera required chiefly patience and delicacy, the painter in fresco must have resolution and audacity. He must calculate each day’s work exactly, and a whole day’s work could be spoiled by a single slip of the hand in the tired evening hour. For fresco, the working sketch was roughly copied in outline on a plaster wall. Then any part selected for a day’s work was covered with a new coat of fine plaster. The effaced part of the design must be rapidly redrawn on the wet ground. ”

“ Painting in tempera on the dry wall is a process in which the colours are tempered with a binding medium, such as glue size, gum, parchment size, or a size made from eggs beaten up with water; the Italian painters added the juice, or gum, of the fig tree, and sometimes vinegar to the egg size. Other methods are encaustic, or painting with wax as a medium, heat being afterwards applied to the wall to blend or to protect the colours; spirit fresco, in which the colours are ground in a wax medium and thinned with spirits of turpentine or oil of spike; water-glass, a German method of wall painting ”

“ In Italy tomb-paintings actually on plaster exist from the 6th century B.C. The earlier panel painters of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. also used tempera processes, though their exact media are not recorded. About the time of Alexander there seems to have been felt a demand for a style of painting in which could be obtained greater depth and brilliancy of colouring, with corresponding force in relief, than was possible in the traditional tempera; and this led to painting in a wax medium with which abundance of “body” could be secured. ”

“ Eminently deficient in works representative of the earliest and purest tendencies of art, our National Gallery nevertheless affords a characteristic and sufficient series of examples of the practice of the various schools of painting, after oil had been finally substituted for the less manageable glutinous vehicles which, under the general name of tempera, were principally employed in the production of easel pictures up to the middle of the fifteenth century. ”

“ It is something fugitive and uncertain, formed of lineaments scarce perceptible, ready to disappear before the eye has fixed them, ephemeral and dazzling. To arrest the vision, to set it on the canvas, to give it its shape and moulding, to preserve the fragility of its texture, to render its brilliance, and yet achieve in the result a solid, masculine, substantial painting, real beyond any other master's work, and able to hold its own with a Rubens, a Titian, a Veronese, a Giorgione, a Van Dyck—this is Rembrandt's aim. ”

“ The gray and stern arches, the hitherto colorless sky of the art temple, now take the azure hue of the heavens, while hovering cherubs look down from their cerulean depths; the relievos glow, and color defines, as it etherealizes, the works of man. Painting, at first absorbed in the plastic arts, scarcely begins to show symptoms of life until she is fully born, and living in her own distinctive form! As that power which develops the almost infinite variety of forms is to the universe, so is painting with its ever ready and vivid canvas to the temple of art. ”

“ Antonio Tempesti, of Florence, a scholar both of Titi and Stradano, was among the first to acquire a celebrated name in Italy for landscapes and for battles. He practised engraving on copper, prepared cartoons for tapestry, and gave scope to his genius in the most fanciful inventions in grotesque and ornamental work. He surpassed his master in spirit, and was inferior to none, not even [Pg 279] to the Venetians. In a Letter on Painting by the Marquis Giustiniani, [211] he is adduced as an example of great spirit in design, a gift conferred by nature, and not to be acquired by art. ”

“ He produced no masterpiece of the first order, but his Work is singularly uniform on a high level. Its chief qualities are dignity and grace with a great richness of color. The deep shadows are warm and full of dusky light, the stylistic poses of the figures always easy, and the weaving of the complicated groupings ever tasteful and harmonious. To the refractory art of fresco painting Andrea brought a richness, depth and variety of color that others hardly attained in oil painting. ”

“ Methods of handling oil color may be reduced to two general classes: (a) the paint is used thin, as a wash, on a prepared canvas, or (b) it is put on in thick opaque touches. In either case the aim is the same—to paint for depth, vibration, illusion of light and color. If brush strokes are to be left intact, each of them must have shape and meaning,—that is, line; if color is put on in a thin wash, then its value, gradation, hue and texture are the main points,—and these belong to structural harmony. Mural painting is the highest form of the art, demanding perfect mastery of Composition. ”

“ The latter is indirect in its suggestion of a conception of beauty other than the classical, and in its equally indirect suggestion of the expressional value of light and of the symbolic use of form and color. Rembrandt’s appeal is rather to the mind; Vermeer’s to the eye. He saw the world as the modern painter sees it, enveloped in natural light, and rendered it, as the modern painter tries to render it, by a close discrimination of delicately different values. ”

“ Light and dark are conceived in a double fashion, as factors in relief and as offering intrinsic beauties in their gradations. We have a refinement on the method of Masaccio, which is merely structural and dramatic and without much intrinsic charm. But the new beauty of chiaroscuro soon turns out to be incompatible with the old beauty of frank color. Pictures become dusky and mysterious, tending to black and white values. Ever since Leonardo, academic painting has had the sore limitation of regarding shadow as negation of color. ”

“ Motives more varied, gradations of sentiment more delicate, the fugitive and transient phases of emotion, the inner depths of consciousness, had somehow to be seized. It was here that painting asserted its supremacy. Painting is many degrees further removed than sculpture from dependence on the body in the fulness of its physical proportions. It touches our sensibilities by suggestions more indirect, more mobile, and more multiform. ”

“ Then he who flees from shadows, flees also from the glory of our art among noble spirits and gains it with the ignorant herd, which desires nothing in painting but beauty of colors, forgetting entirely the beauty and wonder of showing a flat thing as if it were in relief. ”

“ A good deal of experience and manual dexterity is necessary to enable the painter to execute with rapidity, and calculate the exact degree of humidity in the plaster, requisite for the effect he wishes to produce.
It has been said that fresco painting is unfitted for our climate, damp and sea-coal fires being equally injurious; but the new method of warming all large buildings, either by steam or heated air, obviates, at least, this objection. ”

“ He resolved everything into its component parts, colour as well as light, so that, by eliminating the complicated and condensing the scattered elements from a given scene, he succeeded in drawing without outline, in painting a portrait almost without strokes that show, in colouring without colour, in concentrating the light of the solar system into a sunbeam. It would be impossible in a plastic art to carry the curiosity for [Pg 125] the essential to an intenser pitch. For physical beauty he substitutes expression of character; for the imitation of things, their almost complete transformation ”

“ But this very isolation leads often to mere mannerism in the painter, and robs him of that broad acceptance of the general facts of life which is the very essence of art. Model-painting, in a word, while it may be the condition of art, is not by any means its aim. It is simply practice, not perfection. Its use trains the eye and the hand of the painter, its abuse produces in his work an effect of mere posing and prettiness. It is the secret of much of the artificiality of modern art, this constant posing of pretty people, and when art becomes artificial it becomes monotonous. ”

“ The artist has at his command, without necessity of mixing his colours, every hue to be found in nature, so that freshness and luminosity can always be secured without fear of that loss of brilliancy commonly attendant on the mixing of colour on the palette. Moreover, the fact of pastel being dry permits the artist to leave his work and take it up again as he may choose; and he is free from many of the technical troubles and anxieties natural to oil and watercolour painting. ”

“ Colour and shadow, aërial perspective and complicated grouping, denied to sculpture, but within the proper realm of painting, have their own significance, their real relation to feelings vaguer, but not less potent, than those which find expression in the simple human form. To painting, again, belongs the play of feature, indicative of internal movement, through a whole gamut of modulations inapprehensible by sculpture. ”