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| The Adoration of the Magi Giotto di Bondoni, circa 1320 |
The thin sheets
of gold leaf that Byzantine artists applied to the surface of their pictures look
more artificial than the illusion of gold created by later artists using yellow
and white pigments mixed with oil.
As Leon Battista Alberti observed in his fifteenth
century treatise “On Painting,” (Della
Pictura), when gold leaf is used “some planes shine where they ought to be
dark and are dark where they ought to be light.”
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| Portrait of Jan Pranger by Frans van der Mijn 1742 |
To successful create the
illusion of a plausible three dimensional world on a two dimensional surface requires
the deployment of quite a bag of tricks not least among them the manipulation
of colour. And yet:
When people stand in front of a work of art and talk about how
an artist uses colour they almost always sound pompous, so know-it-all ---and
so beside the point—that my ears shut down and my legs move me away. Maybe for
me this is because colour is the most important aspect of a picture; more
important than line. In reading about technique, when colour comes up my
reaction has always been much as it was when I was in tenth grade and Lettie
Lee Craig tried to teach us algebra. Blind panic. It wasn’t lack of interest exactly: As a
graduate student in physiological psychology, I specialised in visual perception—how
the brain and eye communicate, and the results. But about how artists use
colour to create the colours I look at in the work, I remained ignorant and
helpless to do anything about it. I am happy, even excited, to use the past
tense. I’ve just finished reading “Colour.” It has been a revelation. Big
applause and much gratitude to its authors, David Bomford of the Getty and
Ashok Roy at London’s National Gallery. This small book (it is less than 100
pages) is the latest in the NG’s “A Closer Look” series. (Others have been
about such topics as Angels, Allegory and Frames.) “Colour,” is clear and
logical with many useful illustrations from the gallery’s collection used as
examples, yet it is also lively and engaging, it doesn’t pack too much into a
paragraph. It gave me time to take in an idea—like Alberti’s about the
supremacy of paint over actual gold to create a believable image of gold—before
going on. Now the use of glazes makes sense. I understand the connection between Venice's position as a key trading post made pigments available to local painters like Veronese and Titian which were hard to get--or prohibitively expensive--to those elsewhere. And so much more. If you have had any of the kinds of gaps I regret having had, you will learn a lot too.
The publication of “Colour” is pegged to the National
Gallery exhibition “Making Colour,” which opens June 18. I'll be there and post.
By the way: The illustrations here come from the Metropolitan and the Rijksmuseum. The National Gallery's images don't seem to want to join in with cut and past.
