Inventing the World by Meredith Small

Author:Meredith Small
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2020-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

ART SUPPLIES

Underneath all the glorious art in Venice, much of which is still in place in churches and guild halls, is the moneymaking business of the production of art in which Venice excelled. Unlike artists in other cities of the Italian Renaissance, Venetian artists did not concentrate on fresco for the simple reason that lagoon water always seeps up into walls and frescoes fall off. So, artists in Venice mainly used canvas, and of course, with all the shipbuilding in Venice, canvas was readily available. According to art historians, Venetian sail canvas was not only easy to get but was also regarded as the best quality around.124 The word canvas is derived from the Latin word for hemp, cannabis, the oldest fiber in the world to yield a fabric. But in Venice, the canvas was made from cotton, and that particular fabric soon spread across Europe.125 Venetian canvas is a simple woven cloth with one weft crossing up and under one warp. It can be stitched together, as the great painter Tintoretto often did to produce a large canvas, and nothing is wasted. Canvas also has the advantage of being lightweight. This means a huge stretched and framed canvas can hang from a high ceiling without fear of its crashing down and killing people.

Besides the ubiquitous use of canvas, Venetian painters stood out because they quickly adopted oil paint first used by Flemish artists.126 The advantages of oil paint over tempura, the other broadly used paint, is that oil is long lasting. At the same time, oil paint dries slowly and gives the artist a chance to manipulate stroke and color. Tempura, in contrast, is bounded by egg yolk and therefore dries quickly and cannot be manipulated much once it hits the canvas or wood panel. The Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini was the original master of oil paint, adding translucent, luminous layers and incorporating gold.127 Using oil paint, he was able to capture fine details of objects and create accents of reflected light. This medium can also be easily glided against itself or pushed this way and that to give a flat surface a topography. With oils, shadows in garments and curtains take on very real elements of light and dark that give movement to a painting. Bellini’s style was the foundation for all later Venetian painters such as Titian (Tiziano Vicelli), Tintoretto (Jacopo Comin), and Paolo Veronese.128

Oil paint is made by mixing powdered pigments with linseed oil. Before the late 1400s, pigments were purchased at an apothecary. But in 1493 Venetians created a special occupation called vendecolori (sellers of pigments); this was a profession unique to Venice and the city subsequently became a destination for out-of-town painters shopping for pigments. Venice was well placed to have all these colors because the raw materials that arrived from the East were pure and nicely ground for use.129 The venedcolori, also exported these pigments to other countries and cities since such shops did not appear anywhere else in Europe for two hundred years.

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