What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna

166 STEPLESSNESS
entire lifetimes, the product of long years of meditation, prayer,
and experiments—in only one short line of text. 3
Painting is also constituted by this vacillation: either it is a fully
developed technique, replete with recipes, thick instructional
volumes, and generations of accumulated wisdom, or else it is a
trackless scene of perpetual isolated reinvention. History favors
the first view. In classical oil painting technique, first there is the
blank panel, and then a succession of layers: a coat of size (glue)
mixed with white (like chalk or marble dust), to make the canvas
as brilliant as possible; then the imprimatura (underpainting)
over the entire canvas; then the underdrawing; the grisaille (a
monochrome version of the painting, in full detail); and finally the
painting itself—a succession of body colors, painted outlines,
details, glazes, and varnish. Each of these has its own logic and
its own rules. Late medieval tempera paintings like Sassetta’s
involve even more layers—at least a dozen from the raw panel to
the final coat. The medieval artist Cennino Cennini recommends
that the wood panel be coated with five separate layers of glue
mixed with chalk and marble dust. Each layer has to be sanded
before the next is applied, and at one point a linen cloth is glued
down and covered over to strengthen the entire assembly. 4 Only
then, after weeks of work, can the painting itself be started.
Later, in the Renaissance, it became popular to give paintings a
sense of unified atmosphere by painting them with glazes, thin
washes of paint mixed with varnish. A golden glaze might help
bathe a scene in the glow of a sunset, and a bluish glaze could
turn a day scene into a nocturne. (Hollywood does the same with
blue filters for night scenes.) Subtler glazes can blend individual
leaves into masses, or help unify the loud colors of a rug so it
looks like a single piece of fabric. Titian is the most famous for
glazes, although his predecessor Giovanni Bellini may have used
more of them. Titian is supposed to have boasted that he used
“thirty or forty glazes” per painting, but glazes are so evanescent
that even modern conservators cannot decide on how many there
were. A microscopic section through a Renaissance painting
reveals the astonishing patience that went into their making
(COLOR PLATE 10). No twentieth-century painting would have
a cross-section like this. The artist, Cima da Conegliano, has put
down a dark imprimatura and then at least thirteen layers of
yellows, browns, and Copper Resinate Green. Each layer is
different: some are fairly thick, and others, including the first one