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

168 STEPLESSNESS
Today only the idea of classical layering remains. Henri-
Georges Clouzot’s 1956 film, The Mystery of Picasso, records
Picasso showing off for the camera, repeatedly destroying and
recreating his images. He was not layering in the older fashion,
since he covered over his mistakes with opaque paint instead of
translucent veils; but he was layering in a temporal sense,
because the finished painting rested on the layered memory of
discarded ideas. Steps, layers, preparation, and planning can be
components of the concept of painting even when they are
absent from its practice.
In the late nineteenth century there were scholars in Germany
and France who were especially well-informed and methodical in
their attempts to recapture the forgotten methods of Venetian
Renaissance painting. They read the old painters’ manuals,
analyzed paintings in museums, and wrote down instructions for
making paintings in the way that Van Eyck, Botticelli, Bellini,
Titian, and El Greco had done. Those recipes propose specific
sequences of paint layers—sometimes up to twenty of them—
from initial size to final varnish. Max Doerner, one of the most
careful students of Old Masters technique, reports that his
students made perfect replicas of a painting by El Greco
following these eleven steps: 6
(1) Begin with a uniform white,
(2) Then add a "luminous brown imprimatura,” with no
white in it. The imprimatura may be a glaze, thinned with
mastic, or egg tempera, which must then be varnished so it
can support layers of oil paint.
(3) On top of that, make the drawing, either in tempera or
directly on the imprimatura in white chalk.
(4) Paint white into the existing dark, using a white
tempera composed of egg yolk, white lead, and oil. Begin
with the sharpest highlights and spread out, scumbling, in
“semi-opaque layers" into all the light areas, creating
passages where the dark imprimatura shows through in
"optical greys” (that is, tones that are the product of several
translucent layers, like plastic sheets, seen all at once). At
this point, the picture as a whole should be much lighter
than the original.
(5) Give the entire painting a "light intermediate varnish,"
and then