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

170 STEPLESSNESS
imprimatura in an earth tone, the equivalent of modern Raw
Sienna. That tone is unmistakable in the navel, between the pit of
the navel and the shadow to its right, and again on the elbow,
just right of the shadow at the ulna. Those two places are very
thin, and they take their brightness from the white canvas size
just beneath them. That much is clear enough. But then what?
The brightest portions of the belly are pastose paint, very thick,
and it is typical for Titian to reserve his densest paint for flesh
tones. (He changed his mind about this painting several times,
even painting out a male figure who was next to Venus, and that
also contributes to the density.) Sometimes painting techniques
can be gleaned from the exotic kinds of photographs
conservators take. But X-Rays can’t help much when the paint
gets this thick because the lead in the Lead White becomes an
opaque shield, hiding whatever structure the painting might
have.
It is reasonable to suppose that there are many layers here—but
how many? The only way to begin to guess that is to look closer
to the shadows, where the paint is thinner. In my experience the
way to recreate Titian’s flesh textures is to build up slowly from
the imprimatura, in fairly dry thin layers that are almost
scrubbed on to the canvas. There is some evidence of that in the
ribbed look of the paint closest to the imprimatura. As the paint
gets thicker, the color gets brighter. Shadows are built in layers of
thin dark paint, and the paint stays thin as the shadows get
deeper. The upper part of the shadow on the flank has been
painted that way, and even though it is thin, Titian might have
gone over it a dozen times to get the look he wanted. Rubbing
with the brush and even with a cloth helps blend the layers one
into the next—and that is another reason why microscopic
sections are powerless to decide the issue of technique. A sample
taken from Venus’s belly would only show one or two layers, but
Titian’s boast of thirty or forty might well be right. One sign that
the paint was rubbed is that the only sharp lines are provided by
brushstrokes added at the very end of the process—the ones used
to define the contours and cast shadows. Titian went over the
arms and abdomen with a wavering contour, and he put
triangular brown shadows to the right of the navel and on the
point of the ulna. Those marks must have been about the last
things he did, unless he gave the whole figure a single light glaze