Renaissance Italian painting techniques

Renaissance Italian painting techniques
M. Eveno1 , P. Walter1
1
Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France, CNRS-UMR171, Paris, France
E-mail : [email protected]
The aim of the presentation is to give a general survey of the Italian painting technique
at the end of the XVth century and at the beginning of XVIth century. The different parts of
an easel painting will be presented : the supports, the ground, the priming or ”Imprimitura”,
the underdrawings, the pigments used at that time and the binding medium. Examples from
Italian master paintings like Mantegna, Perugino, Raphael, Leonardo Da Vinci or Titien will be
presented.
At that time, the most common support is wood and more particularly poplar, but painters
like Leonardo also employed walnut. With regard to the canvas support, which will become
predominant at the second half of the XVIth century, interesting paintings from Mantegna, for
whom much work that have survived are on canvas, will be shown.
Grounds are mainly made of gesso, a calcium sulfate mixed with glue. Egg tempera is still a
frequent binder at the beginning of the Renaissance but with the use of oil-based binding media,
imprimitura become common. The importance of the priming, and the variation of his color
and his composition will be described. Concerning the pigments, Renaissance Italian palette is
relatively simple ; a majority of mineral pigments and some organic compounds, but there is also
some atypical compounds, like powdered glass that have been added to the paint layer.
At the end of the 15th century, Italian painters explored the new effects made possible by the
use of the oil medium. They created a sense of depth and relief following the Flemish technique
of glazes, which allowed the spreading of very thin and translucent layers, rich in medium and
with low pigment content. A striking example is given by the realisation of the shadows in the
paintings of Leonardo da Vinci : the Master used the so-called sfumato technique based on
the use of glazes to obtain a smoky aspect for the creation of flesh tones, with very subtle
contours that seem to have no hard edges. This technique has become famous nowadays, mainly
because of the perfection of the art works it has allowed to achieve.
Analytical characterizations of glazes on the paintings of Leonardo and his followers allow
us to improve our knowledge about this technique. As sampling of so high valuable painting
areas is impossible, then an experimental non invasive approach is required. X-Ray fluorescence
measurements were realized on seven paintings of Leonardo da Vinci preserved in the Louvre’s
museum. This technique is widely used for qualitative determination of the pigments but it is
very difficult to interpret the data quantitatively in the case of layered structures such as easel
paintings.
In order to access to the composition and thickness of each layer of the carnations, we have
developed a new procedure, based on the use of differential X-ray attenuation and fluorescence.
Beyond the characterization of the palette, we obtained in depth information on how Leonardo
modeled his shadows. Comparisons between the different paintings of Leonardo, and also with
contemporaries’ works of art, permit to highlight specific features in the Leonardo technique.
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