Virtual Lecture - 14th Century Italian Paintings

Good morning, everyone. We will begin shortly. Good morning, everyone. We will begin shortly. All right. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our virtual talk. We are excited to have you with us this morning, and I wanted to go over a few housekeeping things before we get started. First and foremost, please keep yourself muted throughout the presentation. If you have any questions, please feel free to type your questions into the chat box at the bottom of your screen, and our speaker will be happy to address any questions or comments at the end of the program. And if you're joining us over Facebook Live, welcome to you as well. Our Facebook audience can also ask questions using the comments section on Facebook, and we will be monitoring those comments and answering those questions at the end of our program as well. Lastly, this talk is being recorded and streamed live and will be posted to our social media channels once the talk is over. And if you would like to rewatch this talk or watch any of the previous virtual tours and talks, please check out our YouTube and our Facebook pages. Now, without further ado, I'm excited to introduce to you Bianca Garcia, our speaker today. Mrs. Garcia is the Assistant Conservator of Paintings at the Babur Art Conservation Center. She will be talking about the artistic process that was employed by 14th and 15th century artists to create panel paintings, and she will highlight some of the important early Italian panel paintings in the Timken collection. So, please join me in welcoming Bianca Garcia. Thank you, Christina, and thank you all for being here this morning at 10 a.m. to talk about Italian paintings. Let me share my screen with all of you. You should be now seeing the presentation. So, like I said, we're going to be talking about 14th century Italian panel painting, a little bit about their background history, how they were made, and sort of how and how they were used. So, the 14th century in Italy is known as the Trocento. It's also known as the Early Renaissance or the Proto-Renaissance, and this is a transformation period in Italy. You, at the beginning of the century, you are transitioning out of the Middle Ages and medieval tradition, and then by the end of the century, you see the beginning stages of what the Renaissance would bring. The 14th century Italy is, we have to remember that Italy is not a country yet, back then. Italy is made up of separate independent kingdoms, republics, and city-states. So, you're shifting from the feudal agricultural system that you have before, and people are moving into urban centers. This is the period when cities start to grow. So, there's a shift in sort of power dynamics at the time, and as the city populations grow, then you also have the rise of wealthy merchants. Now, northern and central Italy were some of the richest regions in 14th century Europe at the time, and instead, excuse me, the most prominent cities were Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, because these were port cities. So, they have fleets of ships, and they're heavily involved in the slow growth trade and commerce with the east, and then Florence and Siena will also grow as artistic centers, and they're rich through banking and bull trade. So, this is the period of writers like Dante, and Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and then you have artists like Giotto, Cimabue, Lorenzetti, and Duccio. We also have to remember that this is the century that saw the Black Plague. It arrives to Italy, and the map on the left sort of shows the trade route and how the plague moved through Europe at the time, and how quickly it kind of spread. We're talking about, what, less than 10 years? So, it arrives to Italy from the east through these trade routes, spreads throughout Europe, and it's estimated that this decimated somewhere between a quarter to about half the population of Europe at the time, and this had a deep impact on society, and I think we can now sort of all collectively relate to this on a different level than we used to before, like the impact of pandemic, and society, and how it also might affect art. On the right, we have images from the Ilceric Manuscript. It's from France, but it's still depicting some of these scenes, so it's really weighting heavily on artistic production. Art in 14th century Italy was religious, even civic art, because the church was the dominant cultural force, and so most paintings are going to be of religious subjects, and in this slide, we can see a progression of art from the same subject matter of art from 7th century Byzantine art all the way to 14th century Italian painting, and you can see how it's pretty much the same style and depiction with some minor changes as we move through time, and it's not until the very last slide, your 14th century Italy with Giotto, then you start seeing like, oh, this looks a little bit different, and this is kind of new. You see kind of volume, different colors, but also it like figures are just not as rigid as they used to be, and this is what's going to kind of mark that transition into the Renaissance. Art and religious images have really important roles, and because they were used as the depictions for religious worship, so these are the images that worshipers are looking at, and that they're drawn inspiration from. There's also no separation of tangible and intangible, so the physical object that is the painting and the actual saint or holy person it's depicting, it's all the same, so the object itself then takes on this religious and holy quality. Art was also an educational tool for the church. Most of the population at the time was illiterate, so these paintings were a way to convey information through pictures, and this is why the iconographic program is so specific, and this is a really important job for the artists who are creating this artwork. So these works were conservative and uniform, and they followed strict rules as this uniform and predictable presentation helped reinforce the church's message and authority, so this is why most altarpieces prior to the 15th century are all going to look very similar to each other. There is an increase in the number of altarpieces that are commissioned in the 14th century, and this is due in part, I mean there's many reasons, but largely two of them. One is that there was a change in the mass format in the previous century, so in the 13th century priests start raising the host above their heads, and what happened was that the predominant altarpiece style at the time had a lower profile, it was more, it's wider, more horizontal, so it didn't really provide a great background for when you raise the host, so that is what gives rise to the vertical format and style that becomes popular in the 14th century and after, and here we kind of have an image on the left from a missile that shows the priest raising the host, which is a new part of the mass at the time, and on the right we have an altarpiece by Duccio, a 14th century altarpiece that's showcasing this new vertical style that's all the rage at the time. The other factor that also helps promote some of this artistic production is the price of the mendicant orders. The mendicant orders are different from the monastic orders because they are about serving the community, so they were officially established in the 13th century, remember we have the growing city urban populations, which means poor people moving from the countryside into the city, and so the mendicant orders were there to minister to the growing urban population. So as the orders are growing in numbers, they need to build new churches in the city centers. So as these new churches are built, you need to commission a lot of new art to fill these churches. On the left here we have Santa Croce, which is a church in Florence, and this is one of those new churches that's built. It starts at the end of the 13th century construction, it won't be finished until the 15th century, but it reflects all of these things. So inside it's decorated by master Italian artists including Giotto, and this is a famous fresco, the death of Saint Francis, who was the founder of the Franciscan order. So the Franciscans and the Dominicans are going to be the two main religious mendicant orders at the time. All professions in 14th century Italy were organized into guilds, and this is going to be besides the church, probably the other most dominant force in artistic production. The guilds were secular associations that regulated everything about the trade, including production, training, professional ethics, etc., and it was mandatory to belong to a guild and not practice your profession outside of it. So painters were also part of the guild system, and they belonged to the guild of doctors and apothecaries. Now this might not make a lot of sense to us nowadays, but trades were based on the materials that they worked with rather than the final product or function of what they created. So therefore painters belonged to the guild for those who worked with drugs and colors, because colors or the pigments that were used at the time were not just for painting, but some of them also served medicinal purposes and other things. Now guild regulations varied city by city, but overall they regulated artistic production and they served as a quality control agency of sorts. So they imposed penalties for infractions such as substituting silver for tin or you were selling azurite, saying that it was ultramarine. On this slide on the left we have an image of what used to be the guild tribunal building. Like I said, the guilds were the most powerful and secular institution, and they grew to such power that they actually held court, so they would pass penalties. Fun fact, this is now the Gucci Museum in Florence. And on the right you have, it's an 18th century depiction of all the coats of arms of the different guilds that were in Florence at the time, and you can see the guild to which painters belonged to highlighted by the red square. As I said, guilds also regulated artistic training and artists had workshops which had a highly hierarchical nature. So workshops served as artist studios, but it was also the training schools for the younger artists. Artists went through a rigorous training program that could be no less than three years as dictated by the guild, and the training typically began in the adolescence. No apprentice could be older than 25 years, and the masters could only take one apprentice at a time. Again, this was all guild regulation. They would start by doing menial tasks such as cleaning the studio, running errands, then slowly progress to grinding pigments, and then mastering the art of drawing, and finally painting. The image on the top left is a portion from the Sears of Frescoes in Siena showing the allegory of good and bad government, and this specific scene shows a street of Siena full of artists' workshops. So all these little stalls that you see, the openings are the storefronts for the workshops. So people would just walk down the street and you would have the color, the carpenter, the painter. So different professions tended to be in specific parts of the city. Artists typically did not work by themselves, and they had a lot of help in the studio. So the master artist was the head of the workshop, followed by assistants of decreasing experience down to the apprentice. So on the left, you have an image from a French illustrated manuscript, and although it's not Italian, it still shows some of this division of labor, and I love this image because it's a female artist, which is very rare and uncommon, but this depiction survives, and it shows how the artist would be the one painting, and then you have your friends to the assistant in the background grinding the colors for her. The master artist is going to be the one that solicits the commissions. They are going to be the head designer, and they're typically in charge of the most important parts of the painting, such as painting the Madonna's face or the bride's face and such. Assistants could then be assigned increasingly important parts of the painting and be considered collaborators. So they would paint the background or the drapery and other figures in the composition, and it's because of this collaborative nature and the workshop training that it's often difficult to assign attribution to a piece. So if you look at the bottom left, you have an image of stone carving depicting stone and woodworkers, and it gives an idea of the number of people that would sometimes work on the same piece. So here we have a collection of beautiful 14th century Italian panel painting, and it kind of gives an idea of the range for the century. The painting on the bottom left is from the very beginning, 1310. We have the altarpiece, a triptych from the middle of the century, 1355, and then we have the altarpiece, the two boniforces are more like towards the end of the century. Oh, I apologize. I realized that the captions for the two triptychs are switched, so the boniforces should be the one at the bottom and the tomes should be the one at the top. Art is influenced by politics, economics, and social relations, as we just very briefly covered for this entry, and we need to understand this context in order to understand the art, because art serves a function. The idea of artistic expression is a modern concept that was not applicable at the time. Artists were craftsmen. Art painting was a craft, not so much art as we see it today. So now that we know about this, we can now examine how the painting was created. The BACC, the Global Art Conservation Center, created a reconstruction of the Boniforce triptych in the late 1990s. So the original triptych is here on the left, and the reconstruction and images about the process are to the right, and I'll be using some of these throughout the presentation. We're able to draw on historical documents for our current understanding of artistic practices, but it's also really important to look to do the physical study and analysis of the artwork itself as the primary source for our information. 14th century Italian paintings were made on wood panels or walls, which are also known as frescoes. I'm only going to be focusing on panel paintings during this presentation. I said previously mentioned artists were classified by materials and not the end product. So because of this, painters had to outsource the creation of panels and frames to woodworkers who were specialized joiners and belonged to a different guild. So now you can see how a commission would involve multiple craftsmen just by the nature of the material. The manuscript illustration on the left shows a panel maker and some of his tools, some of which are still used to this day. This would all be done by hand, and on the bottom right you can see some of the tools that would have also been used at the time. These are still used to this day. He's hand planning the back of the wood panel. You can also see a frame that's leaning against the lower left of the window. I don't know if you can see my my mouse moving here, but down here at the bottom corner of the window, there's a frame that's leaning against it. About 90 percent of the wood that was used for Italian panel paintings in the 14th century was poplar, and you can see examples of poplar panels in the upper right. Now poplar is really not the best wood to use. It is prone to knots, falls, and it's really susceptible to insect damage, warping, and splitting. Doesn't sound great, right? However, it was really fast growing. It had a really fine wood grain, and it was kind of the only wood that was widely available that could yield panels that were wide enough. Italy had a deforestation problem at the time from agriculture and overgrazing, so any good wood was reserved for house or shipbuilding, and a lot of it had to be imported from across the Alps, so artists are going to have to use what is available to them. Just like we can go to the doctor to have an x-ray that shows our bones, there's a break or something like that, we can also use x-rays to examine artwork. So here we have a collection of x-ray graphs that show some of these condition issues that I just mentioned poplar being susceptible to, because paint layers will hide or, you know, you can see through the paint sometimes to look at the panel with visible light. We can use x-rays to see through the paint layers to look at the condition of the panel at work. On the left, we have an x-ray of a panel showing a split. I said poplar was prone to warping and splitting. Here you can see how the panel has cracked. There's a wide horizontal black line kind of like below the center, so this is the split in the panel. I also mentioned that poplar was really susceptible to insect damage. In the middle image, we have an x-ray graph of different painting showing some of this insect damage, and it's the white squiggly lines that you see. Now, x-ray graphs show it's a density contrast thing, so if there's less material, it's going to look darker. If there's denser material, it's going to look lighter. So this painting has been treated to address the insect tunneling, and what they've done is fill the wood, the tunnels in the wood with a radiopig material. That's why it looks really white, but it's at the same time allowing us to see kind of like where this little worm traveled and how much it ate in the wood panel. And then on the right, we have an x-ray graph of the buniforce of triptych, and we can, again like I said, we can use x-ray graphs to examine the condition of the wooden board and how it was made and see through the paint layer to do this. If the overall size of the painting was larger than a single board, then they have to join multiple boards together to create a larger panel. So the boards can be joined together in a variety of ways. The easiest one was to just do a butt joint and then glue it together. They use a glue made out of cheese and quicklime. It sounds crazy, but it was very effective and really strong wood, and these panels are still holding together to this day. You could also reinforce your join by inserting dowels in between the board gluing. You could also have butterfly keys, which is in the middle slide. Typically, they would also then reinforce the whole panel with battens. So there are these horizontal strips that you see on the image to the right. So the battens would be attached perpendicular to the wood grain. So if the panel is vertical, the battens go horizontally and vice versa. So these battens serve to keep the panel in plane, keep it from warp, and avoid excess warping. A peculiar feature of 14th century panel painting is that most have an engaged or integral frame. As I mentioned, the panel maker would be the one to also create the frame, as we saw from that image, and the frame for the painting on the left, the frame and the painting are one, like it's a single unit. The frame is attached to the panel painting. Unlike modern frames, which are separate from the painting, the engaged frame is attached to the edges prior to the creation of the painting. So in the middle image, you can see at the top how we have the panel and all these other separate pieces that are then glued together and attached to create this one unit. However, many paintings and frames have been separated from each other over time. So the detail that we see on the right shows the edge of the panel painting, but the missing frame, you can see how the edge of the paint layer is thicker and has a slightly raised edge. This is called a BARB, B-A-R-B, and it's created when all the applied layers of paint and ground accumulate at that interface of panel and frame. And we can use the presence of a BARB as an indication that a painting was separated from the frame, so therefore that the painting and frame, it was an engaged painting rather than a painting that was made and then a frame attached to it later. So this will be created when you have an engaged frame. After you have your panel and frame and they were finished and attached, then it could go to the painter's workshop where the painting then could begin. So the first thing that you did with your new panel and frame was you have to slice it. You would cover all of it with a coat of animal glue. This was done to seal the grain of the wood and to make it less absorbent. After the glue, then you would apply a layer of fabric. So you could either apply it only over the flat area of the panel surface or it could cover the entire thing, so panel and frame. And this was done to reinforce joints, cover any flaws or knots in the wood surface, and also to isolate the ground and paint layers from the wood to reduce any kind of, as the wood moves, the paint layer will crack left or that was the idea. There's a kind of like a barrier layer in between. For the Buena Corsa reconstruction, so the images on the left are from the Buena Corsa reconstruction. You can see how we first size the panel and then they attach and cover the whole unit of fabric. The image on the right is from an entirely different reconstruction, so the middle image, and they only attach fabric to the flat surface of the panel. And then the smaller detailed image on the far right is actually an x-ray of an entirely different painting that shows the fabric that you can see the fabric in the x-ray. So if we look at the painting, you would only see the paint layer. You wouldn't know that there's a fabric layer, but the x-ray tells us that there is a fabric layer beneath it. After you have your fabric layer, then you could apply the ground layer. In Italy, the ground layer is called gesso. We have sort of adapted the word to mean old grounds, but the gesso was a typical Italian recipe. It was very specific and consistent and it's always made of gypsum mixed with animal glue. Again, this is specific for Italian gesso, which is different from the ground layer that we use in northern Europe, which is made with chalk mixed with animal glue. So gypsum is calcium sulfate. Chalk is calcium carbonate. They both look the same. They're both a white powder. They serve the same purpose. The only difference was geography and geology. In Italy, they have gypsum. In northern Europe, they have chalk. The gesso will be applied in many, many layers over the panel. You can see the diagram on the right. It's showing you how the gesso, the ground layer, would be a continuous layer over the panel and frame. So everything's gessoed at the same time and this is what's creating that bar that I previously mentioned. Here we have a cross-section that shows what, it's a teeny tiny sample that we take from painting and it shows us all the layers. Think of it almost like a slice of cake. I've always thought that was the best comparison, where the paint layer is going to be at the top or it's the icing to your cake. And then we can see the ground and support layers below as we see all the different layers of the cake. So here we can, in this cross-section of a painting, you can actually see that there's two kinds of grounds present. So part of the creation of the panel painting, the process, is to specify that you first apply the lower layer, which has a slightly coarser grit, and it's called gesso grosso. And then after multiple layers of the gesso grosso, then you would apply multiple layers of a finer grit, really fine, called gesso silice. So this is going to be a smoother layer of gesso. The surface has to be scraped even and smooth, and you probably would do this between every layer of gesso so the final surface had a perfect, ivory-smooth finish. Then you would rub charcoal over the surface, and then we use a straight edge to scrape away any bumps or ridges, and leaving the charcoal only in the hollow. So it's only after you've gotten rid of all your charcoal, you no longer see any, but that you know that your surface is ready. After you've scraped your panel, you could do additional work called pasiglia. Pasiglia is the Italian word for casework. So you would apply gesso and build it up in multiple layers to create these decorative elements in all these shapes and patterns that you see. This is all just layers of built-up gesso. Sometimes we use a thicker gesso paste to achieve the volume. So the image on the left is, again, from the Boniforza reconstruction. In the middle, we have an entirely different reconstruction, but it's showing you what the pasiglia would look like after it's been built. So it's erased work that seems to be part of the building, but it's actually in the lower layers of the gesso. And then on the right, we have a 15th century painting where you can see the pasiglia work indicated by the red arrows. So after you have your ground layer laid out, you would then do the underdrawing. So very few 14th century drawings survive to this day, but we know that artists would actually have a drawing to kind of work out the composition. And you could either draw directly on the painting, and you would use your charcoal, and then you would reinforce your lines with paint. Or you could use a tracing method. So you would take your paper with your drawing, and you would cover the back of it with charcoal dust. Then you put your paper in direct contact with your beautiful, white, smooth ground layer, and then you would retrace all the lines of your drawing. So you were creating a carbon copy of your drawing on the panel. So it's pretty clever. However, I think my personal favorite method for transferring the design was called pouncing, so you would take, again, your drawing, and you would do pinpricks along all the lines in your drawing. You put your drawing again in contact with the ground layer, with your panel on the ground layer, and then you would rub, again, charcoal dust through the front of your drawing. So when you lift the paper, you're left with a dotted line design on your panel. Here, like I said, few drawings survive to this day, but here we have a drawing from Raphael. It's a 15th century drawing, but it's still highlighting the method, and you can see in the detailed images how there's tiny little holes, and you can kind of make them out in the larger image, but this kind of, like, confirmation that this was the process they used. And like I said, we always have to go back to the original materials. We're looking at the actual painting, and we can use a digital imaging technique called infrared reflectography to look at the underdrawing of the painting. So our eyes can only see in the visible light range of the electromagnetic spectrum, but these specially modified cameras can see in the infrared section of the electromagnetic spectrum. So infrared can see carbon-containing material like charcoal in an underdrawing, so it will see through the layers of paint that don't have charcoal, and it will see right at the drawing that's just beneath the surface of the painting. So here in the upper left corner, you can see details of two different paintings, but you can see the dots from the pouncing or splitting metal technique that I previously mentioned. Just below it, you have a detail from a painting that I just recently looked at, and it was really cool because you can see how the artist is working out the composition. So you can see how the hand has, like, a second set of lines. Actually, both of them have a second set of lines, and this shows us that the artist kind of changed his mind or struggled a bit with the placement of the hands before finally settling on the final position, which is what we see in the current image. We don't see the second set of lines that's hiding in the underdrawing. And then on the right, we have another cross-section, which is so amazing. It luckily captured that layer of charcoal in the underdrawing. So you can see the gesso, and then the white, you see the white gesso, and then you see the black line that's actually the underdrawing. You can see the red arrows pointing at that black layer. Incision lines were also a common feature of these paintings. They would use a sharp pointed stylus, and then we'd trace and score the lines, trace the outlines of all the forms. These were typically seen around the edges of areas that were to be built in, like the halos. You also see in the background outlining architectural elements and such. You would also see incision lines because they serve as a guideline. So you can sometimes see them in the drapery pole, so kind of like simple guideline stuff of incision lines in addition to the underdrawing. So you have your ground, you have your drawing, then you would do the gilding. But before you have to do the gilding, you would have to apply layers of bole to the areas that would be gilded. Bole is a red clay made of natural herb pigments that was mixed with animal glue or sometimes egg white. And the bole serves two purposes. One, it provides a cushion layer for the polishing and punch work that you would later do for the gilding. This was because the gesso is much more stiffer and brittle, so if you apply pressure to it, the gesso will crack. So now you'll have a crack in your painting. So the bole, because it's clay, it's a bit more plastic and cushiony. Another function of the bole was to serve as a background color for the gilding. If you really thin gold applied over the white background, you'd have kind of like a more greenish tint to it. So having this red layer beneath the bole would provide this like warm glow to it. And like I said, it also acted as a blue color. If in the process of gilding you made a mistake or there's like a little like sliver of the background showing through, if there's a layer of bole present, the red will kind of make it less noticeable versus if it was white showing through, that would be really noticeable. So again, the red bole acts as the warm glow and a blue color. Just like the gesso, the bole also has to be polished to create a smooth surface. And the point of all of this is because any imperfections or roughness in the underlying layers will show through those thin layers of gold leaf. Here on the right, we have a detail of a painting that the background has been very abraded over time. So some of the gold leaf is missing and you can see the red bole that's now clearly visible. Gold leaf was attached. So after you had your layer of bole, then you would re-wet the bole with a mixture of water and alcohol to reactivate the glue in the bole layer. And the point of the alcohol in the mixture was to speed up evaporation. But that's also why this mixture is called gilder slicker, because it's water and alcohol. So water would be used to reactivate the glue and then the gold leaf would stick to it. And that's what gives the technique the name of water gilding. And here you can see, this is also part of the Boniforza reconstruction. You can see all the different tools and materials and part of the process. You have your gold leaf, you have to pick it up from your cushion and you have to lay it down on the paint surface. So you can imagine how these really thin layers of gold leaf would require training and practice in order to get really good at it. So this is another cross-section confirming all the layers that we've discussed so far. Like I said, we draw a lot of information from historical sources or artists' treatises like Chinino Chinini, but we need to look at the actual artwork to confirm that what they were saying was true or it was actually used in practice. So this cross-section is showing you a layer of gesso, you have a layer of gold, and then on top of it you see the really, really thin layer of gold leaf, which is just a beautiful image. So I wanted to mention tin and silver were also used in addition to gold. Gold was kind of like the golden standard, but silver and tin and other metals were also used. They're just serving really poor state, if at all, because they tended to tarnish the road and then over time they turned black, so the areas were either re-gilded or then repainted later on. So once you had your gilding, you had to burnish it to a reflective finish, and for this you would either use an animal tooth or a hematite stone. In this modern image, they're using hematite stone and not an animal tooth. And the goal was to make the altar piece look like it was made out of solid gold. So on the right you see an image of part of the burnishing process and how the top has not been burnished until it's golden, but the areas that have been burnished just take on this really deep and reflective quality, almost mirror-like. Full bathrooms were standard practice in altar pieces because it was a symbol of the divine. We are used to seeing paintings nowadays that have been exposed to centuries of wear and tear, but a brand new bathroom would have been so polished and reflective, it looked almost black, and you can imagine how viewing these pieces in the flickering candlelight of a church or personal altar, it would have been a magical jewel-like scene. So these pieces have a deep impact on the viewer. This is details of an entirely different reconstruction of another painting, so not our one of Corso, but it shows you what the bowl and the gilding would look like and how you can see the incised lines in the final presentation. So those incised lines that you did in the brown layer, so they're beneath the bowl and they're beneath the gilding, they're going to still show through and be part of your final design. After you burnish your gold, then you could do what's called punch work. So you would use a small stamping tool to decorate the halos and the backgrounds. These were all handmade, so the stamps will have unique flaws and markers that make them distinct. So an artist would have his own set of stamps that were used by the workshop, and you can use these marks to, they can be used for attribution, or you can use these marks to say, oh this painting and that painting were probably made in the same workshop because they used the same stamps. The stamps were also passed down from artist to artist, so you can also use them to establish some of these artist relationships. And we are now finally at the paint layer. So paint is made out of pigment and binder, so we're going to talk first about the pigments. Some of these pigments are naturally sourced from minerals or plants and others have to be created. In the top left, you see a collection of earth and minerals, and you can see the variety of colors that they all present. So these would have to be ground to a powder that would be mixed with a medium to create paint, and so this was kind of like the semi-simplest and most straightforward method for creating. Below it, we have a blue pigment that's made out of woad, which is a plant. They first have to make that dye that was then turned into a pigment. A similar plant, or not plant, but dye-based pigment in the upper right, it's cochineal, and it produces a beautiful red. Now this one's anachronistic, and it's not really present in 14th century Italian paintings because it's imported from America. So this is a pigment that's actually discovered in the New World and brought back to Europe after the 15th century, and it's made from brushed plugs. So that's really interesting, but you'll see it kind of takes over because it creates a really prized red color. And then below it, we have lead white. So lead white was the only white pigment available all the way from antiquity up until the creation of zinc white in the 19th century. So it is present in all paintings before then, and it has a really interesting method of manufacture. You would take coils of lead, so a metal lead, and it would be put in these vats, and you'd be filled with urine. So not the most pleasant pigment making process, but they would be left in these vats until the white corrosion formed on the outside of the lead. And I don't know if you've seen raw lead metal, but it looks like silver or any of these metallic sort of metals. So the white is the corrosion product that forms on the outside of the lead, and that would be scraped off and ground into a white paint. Probably the most famous and violated pigment at the time was ultramarine, which is made from lapis lazuli, which is a semi-precious stone. It produced the richest and most beautiful blue. It had this warm kind of purple quality. Other blue pigments at the time, like azurite or indigo or gold, were just a little duller and more on the green side of the blue, but ultramarine was precious. It was mined in Afghanistan, and it came to Europe via Venice. So we talked about these trade routes, east and west, and Venice being one of these port cities that helped facilitate trade. So it coming from overseas is what gives it the name of ultramarine, because ultramarine means from beyond the sea. So this also makes it very expensive, and so it was typically saved for the Virgin Mary, which is also what gives it its other name, the Virgin Blue. So it's typical in paintings of this time period for the sky and any other passages of blue to contain some of these other more common blues like azurite and indigo and gold, but then ultramarine would only be found on the Virgin's blue mantle and things like that. So it's also an indication of wealth. So some art altarpieces would initially be painted, you know, whatever your budget was, you could only afford azurite, but later on the church or the community had more money and they paid for the blue to be repainted in ultramarine, for example. Painters would buy their pigments from the apothecary, and then their studio assistants or apprentices would hand grind them with water, so it's just a powder of pigment and water, to create a paste that was stored in jars. We no longer have apprentices, but we do have interns that can do the grinding for us, and this is a picture of this intern back in the 90s hand grinding the blue for reconstruction. And I love how it's mirrored and echoed in the, again, the scene from the French ulcerative manuscript, because in the background you have the studio assistant also hand grinding a blue pigment. So now that we've covered pigments, we can talk about the paint binder. Egg tempera was the paint system that was used at the time. Oil paints would not arrive from northern Europe until the mid-15th century, and acrylic paints are about 600 years away from being invented, so egg tempera was the predominant paint system in Italy. And it's made by mixing, you take your pigment paste that you hand ground with water, and you mix it with egg yolk. There were no paint tubes at the time, so artists used muscle gel, and they had to be, you couldn't store, you couldn't pre-mix colors. So you could not pre-mix your pigment paste with the egg yolk to have paint ready to use whenever you wanted to, because it dried really fast, you also didn't have a really good airtight container, so you would only mix a small amount at a time that you would use for the day. Painting with this medium is a very precise and painstaking process, because it dries really fast. So you could all, you could not blend brush strokes like you can with oil paint, and so the paint has to be applied in these short parallel strokes of color. And once applied, you cannot go back over it while it was wet, because you would pick it up again. So you have to wait for it to fully dry, so you do your first layer of little lines of paint, you wait for it to dry, and then you can go back and build up all your subsequent layers of color. So it creates a very distinct hatched line look, and these are details from a Duccio Albuquerque that show these characteristic extemporal lines. Like I said, it also required a very systematic approach to painting, because you have to carefully plan out how you're going to build your colors, and where each color is going to go. So you first have to, the first layer is called the underpainting, that's that basic layer that you lay down. It's sort of, you're already establishing the colors for each region, sometimes you would, you can see how you start building up the modeling of folds and things like that. The flesh was first painted with a layer of green earth, and this layer is called verdaccio, the Italian word for it. And even though you will subsequently apply other layers of paint over it, the green tone is still going to have an influence on the final appearance, and that's why some of these paintings, the flesh nowadays look kind of green, because the green is just sort of showing through over time, even more so. So like I said, you build up the layers of paint stroke by stroke, waiting for each one to dry, before you can move on to the next one. So these are details of the Buono Corsa reconstruction, and you can see how it started, and kind of like where it ended. And again, these are details of the painting in a different section. There were additional negative elements that could be added. Everything done over the paint layer was done with a mordant, and it's called oil building. So remember, the first one that's done in the background is called water building, this is oil building. And they would paint on this oil base, kind of like adhesive or coating over the area, and paint it into the slimes that you want to create. And you would let it dry to a tack, and once it was like just tacky, you would apply your gold leaf to it. And it's very easy, very simple, because you didn't have to have all the layers of gold present, and you didn't have to do any punch work, it didn't have to be any of that. However, you couldn't burnish it like you could with the oil building, I mean water building. It's also not well preserved, because you don't have that strong adhesion, and all these preparatory layers that you have for the water building. So oil building a lot of times has been upgraded over time, as the paintings are cleaned. Another technique that you can do is called sculapito, and this would be done by applying paint over the water gilded areas. Yes, I don't know if you do it with oil building, I'm not entirely sure, but you paint over the gold, and then you scratch away the paint to create these designs. So it's really beautiful. It's also done a lot with frames. And here we have the entire Buena Corsa reconstruction sequence. So all the way from the panel preparation, the ground layer, drawing, gesso, all of it. So this now belongs to the Timken. It's a beautiful process, and I highly recommend that you all do it if you have a chance. Unfortunately, like I said, many of these paintings, A, they don't survive with the frames still attached, and also many only survive as fragments. So all larger elder pieces have been split down into smaller individual scenes or figures. And this is commonly done by art dealers in the 19th and early 20th century, because by cutting down the altarpiece, they could sell it for more money. So you're selling individual parts of it versus the whole. And so they only, they now survive in fragments spread out across multiple institutions and private collections. Some have been reunited and are currently displayed as a whole. Others only come together every couple of decades when museums do special exhibitions and bring them all back together. Very few altarpieces remain full or even retain their frames, and even fewer continue to be used for their original intended devotional function. So here we have examples of altarpieces that have been fragmented, and some of them brought back together. The top right image is actually from the San Diego Museum of Art, and it's it's a portion of a Giotto painting that has been cut down. So the tradition of exempra painting and the preparatory steps it required went unchanged for many centuries until the 15th century, when I said we have the introduction of oil paint. And oil paint is gonna be a revolution, and it's gonna take over an exempra and fall out of fashion. However there's the exempra revival in the 20th century, and Andrew Wyatt's Christina's World is probably one of the most famous examples of modern art with exempra at that time period. And we also still have contemporary artists, like the image on the right by Fred Russell. He's an artist that's using exempra and the Italian, the traditional Italian materials and techniques to create these beautiful modern compositions that have every, all the same element as a 14th century painting would have. So that is it for me today. Thank you so much to all of you for listening, and I am now here to answer any questions. All right, thank you very much, Bianca, for this insightful lecture. Gosh, it always blows my mind how much work it was to create a panel painting, you know, all the little steps involved. What a tedious process. You can see how maybe oil paint would have simplified that process in my office. Right, right. All right, I don't see any questions in the chat, and there was no questions on Facebook, so I am just, because out of curiosity, wanted to ask, you know, the Timken has had a long-standing relationship with the Babua Art Conservation Center for many, many years. The BACC conservators have taken care of the works in the Timken collection, and I was just curious if you were working on any of the Timken pieces recently, and I was wondering if you could share if you did. Not specifically for the 14th century Italian collection. But on any of the other works? Have you had any of the other works, you know, gone through your hands, or? Oh, absolutely. You know, Babua, like you said, we have a close relationship with the treated, examined, documented, all of the above paintings from their collection, and done, you know, hands-on treatment, because conservation, we have this, everyone sort of has this image of a conservator working at the easel, doing their little work. But we examine artwork, so like x-radiographs, infrared, pigment analysis, all of this sort of has to build, to create this body of knowledge on the piece, and the artists really understand the piece. Like I said, you need this whole context. It's not just the image, it's how it's made, and why. Right. The historical context, that's right. And do I understand this right? So if I had, you know, a painting at my home, you know, I, maybe even something that is damaged, and I wanted the BACC to look at it, can somebody just schedule an appointment with you guys, or how does it work? Absolutely. We have, we are a non-profit, so we have a lot of cultural institutional members, but we also work with private clients, so anyone that has a painting or a piece of art can come to us, get an appointment, we could do a consult with you, examine, kind of like, what are your goals for the treatment, and what's, maybe what are some of the condition issues, and we can sort of work That's cool. And you don't only just work on paintings, you have conservators who work on paper as well, right? We do. So BACC specializes in the treatment of paintings and works of art on paper. Now that being said, within paintings, we also work on painted surfaces, so polychrome sculptures or frames are also included in it, and we also do wall paintings. All right, wonderful. Well, if anybody has any questions, feel free to unmute yourself now. I see in our chat, somebody's just saying, that was so informative, thank you so much, please keep doing these, I feel like I've had a university lecture, so that is really wonderful feedback, thank you so much. I had a question, Christina, yeah, I wasn't, I don't know what happened, I just zoned out for a second, were you saying that to apply the gold, the water-based glue is better than the oil-based, and why did they come to that conclusion? Just how the paintings have survived to this day, so in order to apply the background gold, they have these layers, right, that they have to prepare, so you have the ground with the gesso, and then the bowl, and the bowl would be re-wetted, so the glue in that layer is reactivated, and the gold leaf sticks to it, so it's adhered through glue, it's adhered through water, the suction of the gold leaf, it's so thin, it just sticks to it, like it's just on it. With the oil gilding, it's just different, it sits more on the surface, so as the paintings have been clean over time, and scratches, and things like that, that gilding on top, it's just not as well adhered as the gold in the background, so it just gets abraded. Okay, so the Timken, the Timken Madonnas that we have, pretty much, is that gild on oil, because it was earlier, or had they already moved to the water? They're both used at the same time, so it's not that one's used before the other. Okay. They're using a combination of techniques for the same thing. Got it. Okay, many thanks. Yeah, many, many thanks, and before you all go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find this talk, and all of our previous virtual talks on our YouTube channel, and if you're interested in finding out more about Timken free virtual tours and talks, please visit our website under the events section, you can see all of our upcoming programs. So again, thank you so much to Bianca for this excellent talk, and thank you, all of you, for joining us this morning, and please check in with us again in the future. Thank you. Thank you. Bye, and thanks.