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

WHAT PAINTING IS 171
to unify it. Over the whole he put a varnish of natural resin,
perhaps with a hint of brown tone in it.
The method is typical of Titian up until the last decade of his
life: the glazes and thin layers are all about smoothing, softening,
and blurring. Each layer adds a cloudy harmony, blurring lights
into shadows and slurring one form into another. Sharp forms
are made toward the beginning, and again at the end. Everything
else is slurring, glazing, and veiling, working to unify the paint
across the entire canvas. When Titian’s hand movements can be
inferred from the painting, they often fit that description: they are
rubbing and caressing gestures, or gestures like washing and
stroking.
It may seem that I have not said very much, but I have said
essentially all there is to know about what Titian did. This is one
of the kinds of oil painting whose techniques are essentially and
permanently lost. The history of oil painting methods is exactly
parallel in this respect to the history of alchemical methods.
Because they were often secret, or known only to a few people,
alchemical recipes were easily lost. As a result later alchemists
and painters tended to overvalue the fragmentary reports of
elaborate methods. Curators, conservators, and art historians
tend to believe such stories (what else can they believe?), and
they describe paintings like Titian’s as if they have multiple
glazes, carefully planned translucent layers, and a full
monochrome grisaille underneath the body color. Often the
paintings themselves give very little evidence of fully finished
grisailles, or of any glazes at all, but that does not deter the
historians and conservators from their convictions.
Like alchemy, painting has always been insecure about its
most basic store of information. Perhaps the alchemical labor is
the work of a full, long lifetime, spent scouring the libraries of
Europe and preparing elaborate, year-long experiments—as
Michael Maier did when he tried to make the Stone. But on the
other hand, it might be a matter of a flash of inspiration or a
moment of supreme profound comprehension, more like a
religious epiphany than a tiresome scholarly routine. In painting,
it may be that the scattered painting manuals and the old letters
and anecdotes are mostly right, and that classical painting was an
elaborate body of knowledge, something that had to be learned
slowly, from the ground up, in a four-year curriculum or a long
apprenticeship. But it may also be that painting is intuitive, and