Fleshing out the Body: The "Colours of the naked" in Workshop Practice and Art Theory, 1400-1600 (original) (raw)

Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting

Renaissance and Reformation, 2009

Renaissance et Réforme / 83 But this may be another example of the typical scholarly division of labour between the Reformation on the continent and that in England. Clearly researchers of one area need to become more informed of developments on the other side of the Channel. Furthermore, Martin's attempt to explain the appeal of Familism to sixteenth-century Englishmen surely could have been assisted by Alastair Hamilton's 1981 study, The Family of Love, which quite successfully examined Niclaes' appeal for Dutchmen. Although Hamilton's study appeared too late to be included in the original article version of the chapter, some comparison could have been made for this present volume. These reservations aside, Martin's work is a welcome addition to the debate on the nature of popular religion and artisanal reform. It is a clearly written account of radical reform in England which also provides a useful introduction to the subject for undergraduate students. It definitely ought to be on the shelves of all university libraries which collect in the field of Reformation studies. GARYK. WAITE, University of New Brunswick Marcia B. Hall. Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. 131 pis. + xiv + 274. The sixteenth-century Venetian author and commentator on Titian, Paolo Pino, wrote that colour composition is the "true alchemy of painting," an observation that aptly introduces the combined themes of science and magic, of natural materials and their erudite artistic manipulations which a history of colour in painting would seem to touch upon. In the Preface to her informative study, Marcia Hall explains the inversion of her title (from theory and practice) and her aim to treat picturemaking primarily in the physical sense. This distinguishes the direction of her work from Martin Kemp's recent The science of Art, for example (and from which I take Pino's observation) in which, under the title "The Colour of Light," he demonstrated how theoretical colour science had, in some ways, only a limited reflection in the practices of Renaissance artists, especially before Leonardo, who were working out of the practical tradition recorded by Cennini in c. 1390. The inversion of the title also implies a conscious, but not exclusive, focus on painterly methods as bearers of meaning, rather than on intellectual meditations on colour. Hall naturally weaves into her account, however, the illuminating opinions of Vasari, and, in relation to the "modes" of colouring, emerging aesthetic notions, inspired by ancient writings on rhetoric and musicand hinted at by Baldassare Castiglionesuggesting that the requirements of an artistic genre occasioned an appropriate formal mode. spécialiste ou non, est donc tout disposé à accueillir favorablement le petit livre de Colette Quesnel. Son plan est fort simple. Le premier de ses quatre chapitres, "Mourir de rire," présente les deux thèmes de l'ouvrage: le lien entre le rire et la mort (par exemple, les gladiateurs percés au diaphragme, qui, disait-on, riaient en mourant), et le rire en tant que signe de la joie spirituelle (Philon d'Alexandrie). Ensuite, dans "Rire ou ne pas rire," l'auteur esquisse une histoire, tirée du livre de John Moreall, des théories du risible à partir d'Aristote, et discute brièvement quelques ouvrages modernes sur Rabelais.

A Painter's thoughts on color and form

Color Research & Application, 1987

Like hut of muny art students, my initial training seemed dominated by linear drawing, so that painting too often became a matter of outlining shapes and then coloring them in. it was not until i more closely studied the work of CPzunnc, Seurat, Robert Delaunay, and other great colorists, that I gained more insight into how color might be used independently of drawing, of how color could create its own ,form arid ultimutely become a subject of artistic experiment in ifs own right. This article examines one artist's thoughts on the relationship between druwing and color, set within a wider, art-historical context.

Cultivating Complexions: Cleaning and Coloring the Flesh in the Art of Renaissance Nudes and Botticelli's Birth of Venus

Venus and the Arts of Love, 2021

Chapter 2 examines early representations of the female nude by Paolo Ucello and his workshop, Lo Scheggia (Giovanni di ser Giovanni Giudi), Paolo Schiavo, Antonio Pollaiuolo, and Sandro Botticelli. Working between 1425 and 1485, these artists privileged tangible flesh and anatomy over celestial splendor and symbolism. This chapter investigates medieval and early Renaissance understandings of skin, outlines the characteristics of a healthy complexion, and discusses the role of flesh in both marriage negotiations and reproductive physiology. To cultivate desirable complexions, noble women and their handmaidens practiced Venus’ secret arts, the materials of which consisted of ewers, basins, tubs, soaps, depilatories, creams, ointments, perfumes, dyes, and paints. In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century medical treatises, women were likened to artists: first, in their ability to generate new persons, and second, in their manipulation of specific materials to transform their own visages and cultivate rosy-hued complexions. For artists, social success also depended on picturing desirable flesh. This challenge prompted innovations in modeling anatomy, mixing colors, working with binders, and fashioning glazes.

Painting by numbers: Evolution and standardization of colouring in the seventeenth century

ALLA MANIERA: TECHNICAL ART HISTORY AND THE MEANING OF STYLE IN 15th TO 17th CENTURY PAINTING, 2024

Skilful material depiction is one of the main stylistic features of seventeenth-century Netherlandish art. Where sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century painters were experimenting with colour combinations for material depiction, Dutch artist and teacher Willem Beurs could write a book containing standardized reci- pes for marvelously animated surfaces and ideal appear- ances in 1692, The Big World Painted Small. His method corresponds with the techniques of the best artists of his time. This paper demonstrates the development of successful colour combinations, juxtapositions and layer- ing. The depiction of grapes serves as an example to contribute to our understanding of the ‘tangible style’: paintings showing convincing material depiction, which emerged from technical abilities and practice, and which was achieved in the course of the seventeenth century through standardization of complex painting techniques.

The Medieval Genesis of a Mythology of Painting

2019

The Medieval Genesis of a Mythology of Painting. This dissertation attempts to enrich awareness of the late antique and early medieval preconditions of art which fortified today’s capacity for painted representations to fulfill a demand for the presence of absent individuals, such as in the case of portraiture. Chapter one contextualizes this program of research in terms of my practice as an oil painter, where figuration plays a prominent role. Key aspects of my studio work are introduced, such as my commitment to working from observation, as well as more current methods where figuration is achieved through the accumulation of successive layers of paint. A selection of my paintings is analysed to illuminate interconnections between the studio practice and the program of historical research. Chapter two presents a historical survey of concepts and events which contributed to a mythology asserting painting’s capacity to evoke the presence of missing individuals. The study begins in an...