PAINTING

Painting, the expression of ideas and emotions, with the creation of

certain aesthetic qualities, in a two-dimensional visual language. The
elements of this language—its shapes, lines, colors, tones, and textures—are
used in various ways to produce sensations of volume, space, movement,
and light on a flat surface. These elements are combined into expressive
patterns to represent real or supernatural phenomena, interpret a narrative
theme, or create abstract visual relationships. An artist’s decision to use a
particular medium, such as tempera, fresco, oil, acrylic, watercolor or other
water-based paints, ink, gouache, encaustic, or casein, as well as the choice
of a particular form, such as mural, easel, panel, miniature, manuscript
illumination, scroll, screen or fan, panorama, or any of a variety of modern
forms, is based on the sensuous qualities and the expressive possibilities
and limitations of those options. The choices of the medium, form, and the
artist’s technique combine to realize a unique visual image.

Earlier cultural traditions—of tribes, religions, guilds, royal courts, and states
—largely controlled the craft, form, imagery, and subject matter of painting
and determined its function, whether ritualistic, devotional, decorative,
entertaining, or educational. Painters were employed more as skilled artisans
than as creative artists. Later, the “fine artist” notion developed in Asia and
Renaissance Europe. Prominent painters were afforded the social status of
scholars and courtiers; they signed their work, decided its design and often
its subject and imagery, and established a more personal—if not always
amicable—relationship with their patrons.

During the 19th century painters in Western societies began to lose their
social position and secure patronage. Some artists countered the decline in
patronage support by holding their own exhibitions and charging an entrance
fee. Others earned an income through touring exhibitions of their work. The
need to appeal to a marketplace had replaced the similar (if less impersonal)
demands of patronage, and its effect on the art itself was probably similar as
well. Generally, artists in the 20th century could reach an audience only
through commercial galleries and public museums, although their work may
have been occasionally reproduced in art periodicals. They may also have
been assisted by financial awards or commissions from industry and the
state. They had, however, gained the freedom to invent their own visual
language and to experiment with new forms and unconventional materials
and techniques. For example, some painters combined other media, such
as sculpture, with painting to produce three-dimensional abstract designs.
Other artists attached real objects to the canvas in collage fashion or used
electricity to operate coloured kinetic panels and boxes. Conceptual artists
frequently expressed their ideas in the form of a proposal for an unrealizable
project, while performance artists were an integral part of
their compositions. The restless endeavour to extend the boundaries of
expression in art produced continuous international stylistic changes. The
often-bewildering succession of new movements in painting was further
stimulated by the swift interchange of ideas using international art journals,
traveling exhibitions, and art centres. Such exchanges accelerated in the
21st century with the explosion of international art fairs and the advent
of social media, which offered new means of expression and
direct communication between artists and their followers. Although stylistic
movements were hard to identify, some artists addressed common societal
issues, including the broad themes of racism, LGBTQ rights, and climate
change.

This article is concerned with the elements and principles of design in

painting and with the various mediums, forms, imagery, subject matter,
and symbolism employed or adopted or created by the painter. For the
history of painting in ancient Egypt, see Egyptian art and architecture. The
development of painting in different regions is treated in a number of
articles: Western painting; African art; Central Asian arts; Chinese
painting; Islamic arts; Japanese art; Korean art; Native American art; Oceanic
art and architecture; South Asian arts; Southeast Asian arts. For the
conservation and restoration of paintings, see art conservation and
restoration. For a discussion of the forgery of works of art, see forgery. For a
discussion of the role of painting and other arts in religion, as well as of the
use of religious symbols in art, see religious symbolism and iconography. For
information on other arts related to painting, see articles such
as drawing; folk art; printmaking.

ELEMENTS AND PRINCIPLES OF DESIGN

The design of a painting is its visual format: the arrangement of its lines,
shapes, colours, tones, and textures into an expressive pattern. It is the
sense of inevitability in this formal organization that gives a great painting its
self-sufficiency and presence.

The colours and placing of the principal images in a design may be

sometimes largely decided by representational and symbolic considerations.
Yet it is the formal interplay of colours and shapes that alone is capable of
communicating a particular mood, producing optical sensations of space,
volume, movement, and light and creating forces of
both harmony and tension, even when a painting’s narrative symbolism is
obscure.

Elements of design

1. Line

Each of the design elements has special expressive qualities. Line, for
 example, is an intuitive, primeval convention for representing things;
the simple linear imagery of young children’s drawings and prehistoric
rock paintings is universally understood. The formal relationships of
thick with thin lines, of broken with continuous, and of sinuous with
jagged are forces of contrast and repetition in the design of many
paintings in all periods of history. Variations in the painted contours of
images also provide a direct method of describing the volume, weight,
spatial position, light, and textural characteristics of things. The finest
examples of this pictorial shorthand are found in Japanese ink painting,
where an expressive economy and vitality of line is closely linked to a
traditional mastery of calligraphy.

In addition to painted contours, a linear design is composed of all of

the edges of tone and colour masses, of the axial directions of images,
and of the lines that are implied by alignments of shapes across the
picture. The manner in which these various kinds of line are echoed
and repeated animates the design. The artist, whether acting
consciously or intuitively, also places them in relationship to one
another across the picture, so that they weave a unifying rhythmic
network throughout the painting.

Apart from the obvious associations of some linear patterns with

particular actions—undulating lines suggesting buoyant movement, for
instance—emotive sensations are produced by certain linear
relationships. Thus, lines moving upward express feelings of joy
and aspiration, while those directing the eye downward evoke moods
of sadness or defeat.

2. Shape and mass

Shape and mass, as elements of design, include all areas of different
colour, tone, and texture, as well as individual and grouped images.

Children instinctively represent the things they see by geometrical

symbols. Not only have sophisticated modern artists, such as Paul
Klee and Jean Dubuffet, borrowed this untutored imagery, but the more
arresting and expressive shapes and masses in most styles of painting
and those to which most people intuitively respond will generally be
found to have been clearly based on such archetypal forms. A square
or a circle will tend to dominate a design and will therefore often be
found at its focal centre—the square window framing Christ
in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, for example, the hovering “sun” in
an Adolph Gottlieb abstract, or the halo encircling a Christian or
Buddhist deity. A firmly based triangular image or group of shapes
seems reassuring, even uplifting, while the precarious balance implied
 by an inverted triangular shape or mass produces feelings of tension.
Oval, lozenge, and rectangular forms suggest stability and protection
and often surround vulnerable figures in narrative paintings.

There is generally a cellular unity, or “family likeness,” between the

shapes and masses in a design similar to the visual harmony of all
units to the whole observed in natural forms—the gills, fins, and scales
in character with the overall shape of a fish, for example.

The negative spaces between shapes and masses are also carefully
considered by the artist, since they can be so adjusted as
to enhance the action and character of the positive images. They can
be as important to the design as time intervals in music or the voids of
an architectural facade.
3. Color
In many styles and periods of painting, the functions of colour are
primarily decorative and descriptive, often serving merely to reinforce
the expression of an idea or subject communicated essentially in terms
of line and tone. In much of modern painting, however, the full-
spectrum range of pigments available has allowed colour to be the
primary expressive element.

The principal dimensions of colour in painting are the variables or

attributes of hue, tone, and intensity. Red, yellow, and blue are the
basic hues from which all others on the chromatic scale can be made
by mixtures. These three opaque hues are the
subtractive pigment primaries and should not be confused with the
behaviour of the additive triads and mixtures of transparent, coloured
light. Mixtures of primary pairs produce the secondary hues of orange,
violet, and green. By increasing the amount of one primary in each of
these mixtures, the tertiary colours of yellow-orange, orange-red, red-
violet, violet-blue, blue-green, and green-yellow, respectively, are
made. The primary colours, with their basic secondary and tertiary
mixtures, can be usefully notated as the 12 segments of a circle, as
conveniently depicted in the common colour wheel. The secondary and
tertiary colour segments between a pair of parent primaries can then
be seen to share a harmonious family relationship with one another—
the yellow-orange, orange, and orange-red hues that lie between
yellow and red, for example.

Local hues are the inherent and associative colours of things. In

everyday life, familiar things are described by particular colours, and
these often are identified by reference to familiar things; the green of
grass and the grass green of paint, for instance. Although, as
the Impressionists demonstrated, the inherent colours of forms in the
real world are usually changed by effects of light and atmosphere,
many of the early and classical styles of representational painting are
expressed in terms of local hues.

Tone is a colour’s relative degree, or value, of lightness or darkness.

The tonal pattern of a painting is shown in a monochrome
reproduction. A painting dominated by dark colours, such as
a Rembrandt, is in a low tonal key, while one painted in the pale range
of a late Claude Monet is said to be high keyed. The tonal range of
pigments is too narrow for the painter to be able to match the
brightest lights and deepest darks of nature. Therefore, in order to
express effects of illumination and dense shadow, the artist must lower
the overall tonal key of the design, thus intensifying the brightness
value of the lightest pigment colours.

The Greco-Roman, Renaissance, and Neoclassical method of

representing volume and space in painting was by a system of notated
tonal values, the direction of each plane in the design being indicated
by a particular degree of lightness or darkness. Each tonal value was
determined by the angle at which a plane was meant to appear to turn
away from an imaginary source of light. The tonal modeling, or
shading, of forms was often first completed in a monochrome
underpainting. This was then coloured with transparent washes of local
hues, a technique similar to that of colour tinting a black-and-white
photograph.

Each hue has an intrinsic tonal value in relation to others on the

chromatic scale; orange is inherently lighter than red, for instance, and
violet is darker than green. Any reversal of this natural tonal order
creates a colour discord. An optical shock is therefore produced when
orange is juxtaposed with pink (a lighter tone of red) or pale violet is
placed against dark green. Such contrasts as these are deliberately
created in paintings for the purpose of achieving these dramatic and
disturbing effects.

The intensity of a colour is its degree of purity or hue saturation. The

colour of a geranium, therefore, is said to be more intense, more highly
saturated with pure orange-red than is mahogany. The pigment
vermilion is orange-red at maximum intensity; the brown earth
pigment burnt sienna is grayer and has a lower degree of orange-red
saturation.

Intense hues are termed chromatic colours. The achromatic range is

made up of hues reduced in intensity by the addition of white, making
the tints, or pastel colours, such as cream and pink; or of black,
producing the shades, or earth colours, such as mustard and moss
green; or of both white and black, creating the neutralized hues, or
colour-tinged grays, such as oatmeal and charcoal.

An achromatic colour will seem more intense if it is surrounded by

neutralized hues or juxtaposed with its complementary colour.
Complementaries are colour opposites. The complementary colour to
one of the primary hues is the mixture of the other two; the
complementary to red pigment, for example, is green—that is, blue
mixed with yellow. The colour wheel shows that the tertiaries also have
their colour opposites, the complementary to orange-red, for instance,
being blue-green. Under clear light the complementary to any chroma,
shade, or tint can be seen if one “fixates,” or stares at, one colour
intently for a few seconds then looks at a neutral, preferably white,
surface. The colour afterimage will appear to glow on the neutral
surface. Mutual enhancement of colour intensity results
from juxtaposing a complementary pair, red becoming more intensely
red, for instance, and green more fiercely green when these
are contiguous than either would appear if surrounded by harmonious
hues. The 19th-century physicist Michel-Eugène Chevreul referred to
this mutual exaltation of opposites as the law of simultaneous contrast.
Chevreul’s second law, of successive contrast, referred to the optical
sensation that a complementary colour halo appears gradually to
surround an intense hue. This complementary glow is superimposed on
surrounding weaker colours, a gray becoming greenish when
juxtaposed with red, reddish in close relationship with green, yellowish
against violet, and so on.

Hues containing a high proportion of blue (the violet to green

range) appear cooler than those with a high content of yellow or red
(the green-yellow to red-violet range). This difference in the
temperature of hues in a particular painting is, of course, relative to
the range and juxtaposition of colours in the design. A green will
appear cool if surrounded by intense yellow, while it will seem warm
against blue-green. The optical tendency for warm colours to advance
before cold had been long exploited by European and Asian painters as
a method of suggesting spatial depth (called atmospheric or aerial
perspective). Changes in temperature and intensity can be observed in
the atmospheric effects of nature, where the colours of distant forms
become cooler, grayer, and bluish, while foreground planes and
features appear more intense and usually warmer in colour.

The apparent changes in a hue as it passes through zones of different

colour has enabled painters in many periods to create the illusion of
having employed a wide range of pigment hues with, in fact, the use of
very few. And, although painters had applied many of the optical
principles of colour behaviour intuitively in the past, the publication of
research findings by Chevreul and others stimulated the Neo-
 Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and the later Orphist and Op
art painters to extend systematically the expressive possibilities of
these principles in order to create illusions of volume and space and
vibrating sensations of light and movement. Paul Cézanne, for
example, demonstrated that subtle changes in the surface of a form
and in its spatial relationship to others could be expressed primarily in
facets of colour, modulated by varying degrees of tone, intensity, and
temperature and by the introduction of complementary colour accents.

While the often complex religious and cultural colour symbologies may
be understood by very few, the emotional response to certain colour
combinations appears to be almost universal. Optical harmonies
and discords seem to affect everyone in the same way, if in varying
degrees. Thus, an image repeated in different schemes of colour will
express a different mood in each change.

4. Texture
Pointillism (a term given to the Neo-Impressionist system of
representing the shimmer of atmospheric light with spots of coloured
pigment) produced an overall granular texture. As an element of
design, texture includes all areas of a painting enriched or animated by
vibrating patterns of lines, shapes, tones, and colours, in addition to
the tactile textures created by the plastic qualities of certain mediums.
Decorative textures may be of geometrical repeat patterns, as in much
of Indian, Islamic, and medieval European painting and other art, or of
representations of patterns in nature, such as scattered leaves, falling
snow, and flights of birds.

5. Volume and space

The perceptual and conceptual methods of representing volume and
space on the flat surface of a painting are related to the two levels of
understanding spatial relationships in everyday life.

Perceptual space is the view of things at a particular time and from a fixed
position. This is the stationary window view recorded by the camera and
represented in the later periods of ancient Greek and Roman paintings and in
most Western schools of painting since the Renaissance. Illusions of
perceptual space are generally created by use of the linear perspectival
system, based on the observations that objects appear to the eye to shrink
and parallel lines and planes to converge as they approach the horizon, or
viewer’s eye level.

The conceptual, polydimensional representation of space has been used at

some period in most cultures. In much of ancient Egyptian and Cretan
painting, for example, the head and legs of a figure were shown in profile, but
the eye and torso were drawn frontally. And in Indian, Islamic, and pre-
 Renaissance European painting, vertical forms and surfaces were represented
by their most informative elevation view (as if seen from ground level), while
the horizontal planes on which they stood were shown in isometric plan (as if
viewed from above). This system produces the overall effect that objects and
their surroundings have been compressed within a shallow space behind the
picture plane.

By the end of the 19th century Cézanne had flattened

the conventional Renaissance picture space, tilting horizontal planes so
that they appeared to push vertical forms and surfaces forward from
the picture plane and toward the spectator. This illusion of the picture
surface as an integrated structure in projecting low relief was
developed further in the early 20th century by the Cubists. The
conceptual, rotary perspective of a Cubist painting shows not only the
components of things from different viewpoints but presents every
plane of an object and its immediate surroundings simultaneously. This
gives the composite impression of things in space that is gained by
having examined their surfaces and construction from every angle.

In modern painting, both conceptual and perceptual methods of

representing space are often combined. And, where the orbital
movement of forms—which has been a basic element in European
design since the Renaissance—was intended to hold the spectator’s
attention within the frame, the expanding picture space in late 20th-
and early 21st-century mural-size abstract paintings directs the eye
outward to the surrounding wall, and their shapes and colours seem
about to invade the observer’s own territory.
6. Time and movement
Time and movement in painting are not restricted to representations of
physical energy, but they are elements of all design. Part of the
viewer’s full experience of a great painting is to allow the arrangement
of lines, shapes, and accents of tone or colour to guide the eye across
the picture surface at controlled tempos and rhythmic directions.
These arrangements contribute overall to the expression of a particular
mood, vision, and idea.

Centuries before cinematography, painters attempted to produce

kinetic sensations on a flat surface. A mural of 2000 BCE in an Egyptian
tomb at Beni Hasan, for instance, is designed as a continuous strip
sequence of wrestling holds and throws, so accurately articulated and
notated that it might be photographed as an animated film cartoon.
The gradual unrolling of a 12th-century Japanese hand scroll produces
the visual sensation of a helicopter flight along a river valley, while the
experience of walking to the end of a long, processional Renaissance
mural by Andrea Mantegna or Benozzo Gozzoli is similar to that of
 having witnessed a passing pageant as a standing spectator.

In the Eastern and Western narrative convention of continuous

representation, various incidents in a story were depicted together
within one design, the chief characters in the drama easily identified as
they reappeared in different situations and settings throughout the
painting. In Byzantine murals and in Indian and medieval manuscript
paintings, narrative sequences were depicted in grid patterns, each
“compartment” of the design representing a visual chapter in a
religious story or a mythological or historical epic.

The Cubists aimed to give the viewer the time experience of moving
around static forms in order to examine their volume and structure and
their relationships to the space surrounding them. In paintings such
as Nude Descending a Staircase, Girl Running on a Balcony, and Dog
on Leash, Marcel Duchamp and Giacomo Balla combined the Cubist
technique of projected, interlocking planes with the superimposed
time-motion sequences of cinematography. This technique enabled the
artists to analyze the structural mechanics of forms, which are
represented as moving in space past the viewer.

PRINCIPLES OF DESIGN
Because painting is a two-dimensional art, the flat pattern of lines and
shapes is an important aspect of design, even for those painters concerned
with creating illusions of great depth. And, since any mark made on the
painting surface can be perceived as a spatial statement—for it rests upon it
—there are also qualities of three-dimensional design in paintings composed
primarily of flat shapes. Shapes in a painting, therefore, may be balanced
with one another as units of a flat pattern and considered at the same time
as components in a spatial design, balanced one behind another. A
symmetrical balance of tone and colour masses of equal weight creates a
serene and sometimes monumental design, while a more dynamic effect is
created by an asymmetrical balance.

Geometrical shapes and masses are often the basic units in the design of
both “flat patterns,” such as Byzantine and Islamic paintings, and “sculptural
compositions,” such as Baroque and Neoclassical figure tableaux. The flat,
overlapping squares, circles, and triangles that create the pattern of a
Romanesque mural, for example, become the interlocking cubic, spherical,
and pyramidal components that enclose the grouped figures and surrounding
features in a Renaissance or a Neoclassical composition.

An emphasis upon the proportion of the parts to the whole is a characteristic

of Classical styles of painting. The Golden Mean, or Section, has been used
as an ideal proportion on which to base the framework of lines and shapes in
the design of a painting. The Renaissance mathematician Lucas
Pacioli defined this aesthetically satisfying ratio as the division of a line so
that the shorter part is to the longer as the longer is to the whole
(approximately 8 to 13). His treatise (Divina proportione)
influenced Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer. The Neo-
Impressionists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac based the linear pattern of
many of their compositions upon the principle of this “divine proportion.”
Golden Mean proportions can be discovered in the design of many other
styles of painting, although often they may have been created more by
intuitive judgment than by calculated measurement.

Tension is created in paintings, as it is experienced in everyday life, by the

anticipation of an event or by an unexpected change in the order of things.
Optical and psychological tensions occur in passages of a design, therefore,
when lines or shapes almost touch or seem about to collide, when a
harmonious colour progression is interrupted by a sudden discord, or when
an asymmetrical balance of lines, shapes, tones, or colours is barely held.

Contrasts in line, shape, tone, and colour create vitality; rectilinear shapes
played against curvilinear, for instance, or warm colours against cool. Or a
painting may be composed in contrasted overall patterns, superimposed in
counterpoint to one another—a colour scheme laid across contrasting
patterns of lines and tones, for example.

DESIGN RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PAINTING AND OTHER VISUAL

ARTS

The philosophy and spirit of a particular period in painting usually have been
reflected in many of its other visual arts. The ideas and aspirations of the
ancient cultures, of the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical
periods of Western art, and of the 19th-century Art Nouveau and
Secessionist movements were expressed in much of the architecture, interior
design, furniture, textiles, ceramics, dress design, and handicrafts, as well as
in the fine arts, of their times. Following the Industrial Revolution, with
the redundancy of handcraftmanship and the loss of
direct communication between the fine artist and society, idealistic efforts to
unite the arts and crafts in service to the community were made by William
Morris in Victorian England and by the Bauhaus in 20th-century Germany.
Although their aims were not fully realized, their influences, like those of the
short-lived de Stijl and Constructivist movements, have been far-reaching,
particularly in architectural, furniture, and typographic design.

Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were painters, sculptors, and architects.

Although few artists since have excelled in so wide a range of creative
design, leading 20th-century painters expressed their ideas in many other
mediums. In graphic design, for example, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse,
and Raoul Dufy produced posters and illustrated books; André
Derain, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Mikhail Larionov, Robert Rauschenberg,
and David Hockney designed for the theatre; Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, and
Chagall worked in ceramics; Sonia Delaunay designed textiles; Georges
Braque and Salvador Dalí designed jewelry; and Dalí, Hans Richter, and Andy
Warhol made films. Many of these, with other modern painters, were also
sculptors and printmakers and designed for textiles, tapestries, mosaics,
and stained glass, while there are few mediums of the visual arts that
Picasso did not work in and revitalize.

In turn, painters have been stimulated by the imagery, techniques, and

design of other visual arts. One of the earliest of these influences was
possibly from the theatre, where the ancient Greeks are thought to have
been the first to employ the illusions of optical perspective. The discovery or
reappraisal of design techniques and imagery in the art forms and processes
of other cultures has been an important stimulus to the development of more
recent styles of Western painting, whether or not their traditional
significance have been fully understood. The influence of Japanese woodcut
prints on Synthetism and the Nabis, for example, and of
African sculpture on Cubism and the German Expressionists helped to create
visual vocabularies and syntax with which to express new visions and ideas.
The invention of photography introduced painters to new aspects of nature,
while eventually prompting others to abandon representational painting
altogether. Painters of everyday life, such as Edgar Degas, Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Vuillard, and Bonnard, exploited the
design innovations of camera cutoffs, close-ups, and unconventional
viewpoints in order to give the spectator the sensation of sharing
an intimate picture space with the figures and objects in the painting.

TECHNIQUES AND METHODS

Whether a painting reached completion by careful stages or was executed
directly by a hit-or-miss alla prima method (in which pigments are laid on in
a single application) was once largely determined by the ideals and
established techniques of its cultural tradition. For example,
the medieval European illuminator’s painstaking procedure, by which a
complex linear pattern was gradually enriched with gold
leaf and precious pigments, was contemporary with the Song Chinese Chan
(Zen) practice of immediate, calligraphic brush painting, following a
contemplative period of spiritual self-preparation. More recently, artists have
decided the techniques and working methods best suited to their aims and
temperaments. In France in the 1880s, for instance, Seurat might be working
in his studio on drawings, tone studies, and colour schemes in preparation
for a large composition at the same time that, outdoors, Monet was
endeavouring to capture the effects of afternoon light and atmosphere, while
Cézanne analyzed the structure of the mountain Sainte-Victoire with
deliberated brush strokes, laid as irrevocably as mosaic tesserae (small
pieces, such as marble or tile).
The kind of relationship established between artist and patron, the site and
subject matter of a painting commission, and the physical properties of the
medium employed may also dictate working procedure. Peter Paul Rubens,
for example, followed the businesslike 17th-century custom of submitting a
small oil sketch, or modella, for his client’s approval before carrying out a
large-scale commission. Siting problems peculiar to mural painting, such as
spectator eye level and the scale, style, and function of a building interior,
had first to be solved in preparatory drawings and sometimes with the use
of wax figurines or scale models of the interior. Scale working drawings are
essential to the speed and precision of execution demanded by quick-drying
mediums, such as buon fresco (see below) on wet plaster and
acrylic resin on canvas. The drawings traditionally are covered with a
network of squares, or “squared-up,” for enlarging on the surface of the
support. Some modern painters preferred to outline the enlargement of a
sketch projected directly onto the support by epidiascope (a projector for
images of both opaque and transparent objects).

In Renaissance painters’ workshops, pupil assistants not only ground and

mixed the pigments and prepared the supports and painting surfaces but
often laid in the outlines and broad masses of the painting from the master’s
design and studies.

The inherent properties of its medium or the atmospheric conditions of its

site may themselves preserve a painting. The wax solvent binder
of encaustic paintings (see below) both retains the intensity and tonality of
the original colours and protects the surface from damp. And, while
prehistoric rock paintings and buon frescoes are preserved by natural
chemical action, the tempera pigments thought to be bound only with water
on many ancient Egyptian murals are protected by the dry atmosphere and
unvarying temperature of the tombs. It has, however, been customary to
varnish oil paintings, both to protect the surface against damage by dirt and
handling and to restore the tonality lost when some darker pigments dry out
into a higher key. Unfortunately, varnish tends to darken and yellow with
time into the sometimes disastrously imitated “Old Masters’ mellow patina.”
Once cherished, this amber-gravy film is now generally removed to reveal
the colours in their original intensity. Glass began to replace varnish toward
the end of the 19th century, when painters wished to retain the fresh,
luminous finish of pigments applied directly to a pure white ground. The air-
conditioning and temperature-control systems of 21st-century museums
make both varnishing and glazing unnecessary, except for older and more
fragile exhibits.

The frames surrounding early altarpieces, icons, and cassone panels (painted
panels on the chest used for a bride’s household linen) were often structural
parts of the support. With the introduction of portable easel pictures, heavy
frames not only provided some protection against theft and damage but
were considered an aesthetic enhancement to a painting, and frame making
became a specialized craft. Gilded gesso moldings (consisting of plaster of
paris and sizing that forms the surface for low relief) in extravagant swags of
fruit and flowers certainly seem almost an extension of the restless,
exuberant design of a Baroque or Rococo painting. A substantial frame also
provided a proscenium (in a theatre, the area between the orchestra and the
curtain) in which the picture was isolated from its immediate surroundings,
thus adding to the window view illusion intended by the artist. Deep, ornate
frames are often unsuitable for many modern paintings, where the artist’s
intention is for forms to appear to advance toward the spectators rather than
be viewed by them as if through a wall aperture. In Minimalist paintings no
effects of spatial illusionism are intended, and, in order to emphasize the
physical shape of the support itself and to stress its flatness, these abstract
geometrical designs are displayed without frames or are merely edged with
thin protective strips of wood or metal.

MEDIUMS

By technical definition, mediums are the liquids added to paints to bind them
and make them workable. They are discussed here, however, in the wider
meaning of all the various paints, tools, supports, surfaces, and techniques
employed by painters. The basis of all paints is variously coloured pigment,
ground to a fine powder. The different expressive capacities and
characteristic final surface texture of each medium are determined by the
vehicle with which it is bound and thinned, the nature and surface
preparation of the support, and the tools and technique with which it is
handled.

Pigments are derived from various natural and artificial sources. The oldest
and most permanent pigments are the blacks, prepared from bone and
charcoal, and the clay earths, such as raw umber and raw sienna, which can
be changed by heating into darker, warmer browns. In early periods of
painting, readily available pigments were few. Certain intense hues were
obtainable only from the rarer minerals, such as cinnabar (orange-red
vermilion), lapis lazuli (violet-blue ultramarine), and malachite (green). These
were expensive and therefore reserved for focal accents and important
symbolic features in the design. The opening of trade routes and the
manufacture of synthetic substitutes gradually extended the range of colours
available to painters.

1. Tempera

A tempera medium is dry pigment tempered with an emulsion and

thinned with water. The ancient medium was in constant use in most
world cultures, until in Europe it was gradually superseded by oil paints
during the Renaissance. Tempera was the mural medium in the
 ancient dynasties of Egypt, Babylonia, Mycenean Greece,
and China and was used to decorate the early Christian catacombs. It
was employed on a variety of supports, from the stone stelae (or
commemorative pillars), mummy cases, and papyrus rolls of ancient
Egypt to the wood panels of Byzantine icons and altarpieces and the
vellum leaves of medieval illuminated manuscripts.

The word tempera originally came from the verb temper, “to bring to a
desired consistency.” Dry pigments are made usable by “tempering”
them with a binding and adhesive vehicle. Such painting was
distinguished from fresco painting, the colours for which contained no
binder. Eventually, after the rise of oil painting, the word gained its
present meaning.

The standard tempera vehicle is a natural emulsion, egg yolk, thinned

with water. Variants of this vehicle have been developed to widen its
use. Among the man-made emulsions are those prepared with
whole egg and linseed oil, with gum, and with wax.

The special ground for tempera painting is a rigid wood or wallboard

panel coated with several thin layers of gesso, a white, smooth, fully
absorbent preparation made of burnt gypsum (or chalk, plaster of
Paris, or whiting) and hide (or parchment) glue. A few minutes after
application, tempera paint is sufficiently resistant to water to allow
overpainting with more colour. Thin, transparent layers of paint
produce a clear, luminous effect, and the colour tones of successive
brushstrokes blend optically. Modern tempera paintings are sometimes
varnished or overpainted with thin, transparent oil glazes to produce
full, deep-toned results, or they are left unglazed for blond, or light,
effects.

The great tradition of tempera painting was developed in Italy in the

13th and 14th centuries by Duccio di Buoninsegna and Giotto and
continued in the work of Giovanni Bellini, Piero della Francesca, Carlo
Crivelli, Sandro Botticelli, and Vittore Carpaccio. The 20th century saw
a revival of tempera by American artists Ben Shahn, Andrew Wyeth,
and Jacob Lawrence and by the British painter Lucian Freud. Tempera
was largely replaced mid-century by acrylic paints.

2. Fresco

Fresco (Italian: “fresh”) is the traditional medium for painting directly

onto a wall or ceiling. It is the oldest known painting medium, surviving
in the prehistoric cave mural decorations and perfected in 16th-
century Italy in the buon fresco method.
The cave paintings are thought to date from about 20,000–15,000 BCE.
Their pigments probably have been preserved by a
natural sinter process of rainwater seeping through the limestone rocks
to produce saturated bicarbonate. The colours were rubbed across rock
walls and ceilings with sharpened solid lumps of the natural earths
(yellow, red, and brown ochre). Outlines were drawn with black sticks
of wood charcoal. The discovery of mixing dishes suggests that
liquid pigment mixed with fat was also used and smeared with the
hand. The subtle tonal gradations of colour on animals painted in
the Altamira and Lascaux caves appear to have been dabbed in two
stages with fur pads, natural variations on the rock surface
being exploited to assist in creating effects of volume.Feathers and
frayed twigs may have been used in painting manes and tails.

These were not composite designs but separate scenes and individual
studies that, like graffiti drawings, were added at different times, often
one on top of another, by various artists. Paintings from approximately
18,000 to 11,000 years ago, during the Magdalenian period, exhibit
astonishing powers of accurate observation and ability to represent
movement. Women, warriors, horses, bison, bulls, boars, and ibex are
depicted in scenes of ritual ceremony, battle, and hunting. Among the
earliest images are imprinted and stencilled hands. Vigorous
meanders, or “macaroni” linear designs, were traced with fingers
dipped in liquid pigment.

a. Fresco secco

In the fresco secco, or lime-painting, method, the plastered

surface of a wall is soaked with slaked lime. Lime-resistant
pigments are applied swiftly before the plaster sets. Secco
colours dry lighter than their tone at the time of application,
producing the pale, matte, chalky quality of a distempered wall.
Although the pigments are fused with the surface, they are not
completely absorbed and may flake in time, as in sections
of Giotto’s 14th-century San Francesco murals at Assisi. Secco
painting was the prevailing medieval and
early Renaissance medium and was revived in 18th-century
Europe by artists such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, François
Boucher, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

b. Buon fresco

Buon’, or “true,” fresco is the most-durable method of painting

murals, since the pigments are completely fused with a damp
plaster ground to become an integral part of the wall surface.
The stone or brick wall is first prepared with a
brown trullisatio scratch coat, or rough-cast plaster layer. This is
then covered by the arricciato coat, on which the linear design of
the preparatory cartoon is pounced or engraved by impressing
the outlines into the moist, soft plaster with a bone or metal
stylus. These lines were usually overworked in reddish sinopia
pigment. A thin layer of fine plaster is then evenly spread,
allowing the linear design to show through. Before this final
intonaco ground sets, pigments thinned with water or slaked
lime are applied rapidly with calf-hair and hog-bristle brushes;
depth of colour is achieved by a succession of quick-drying
glazes. Being prepared with slaked lime, the plaster becomes
saturated with an aqueous solution of hydrate of lime, which
takes up carbonic acid from the air as it soaks into the paint.
Carbonate of lime is produced and acts as a permanent pigment
binder. Pigment particles crystallize in the plaster, fusing it with
the surface to produce the characteristic lustre of buonfresco
colours. When dry, these are matte and lighter in tone. Colours
are restricted to the range of lime-resistant earth pigments.
Mineral colours such as blue, affected by lime, are applied over
earth pigment when the plaster is dry.

The intonaco coat is laid only across an area sufficient for

painting before the plaster sets. The joins between each
successive giornate (“day’s work”) are sometimes visible.
Alterations must be made by immediate washing or scraping;
minor retouching to set plaster is possible with casein or egg
tempera, but major corrections necessitate breaking away the
intonaco and replastering. The swift execution demanded
stimulates bold designs in broad masses of colour with a
calligraphic vitality of brush marks.

No ancient Greek buon frescoes now exist, but forms of the

technique survive in the Pompeian villas of the 1st
century CE and earlier, in Chinese tombs at Liaoyang, Manchuria,
and in the 6th-century Indian caves at Ajanta. Among the finest
buon fresco murals are those by Michelangelo in the Sistine
Chapel and by Raphael in the Stanze of the Vatican. Other
notable examples from the Italian Renaissance can be seen in
Florence: painted by Andrea Orcagna in the Museo dell’Opera
di Santa Croce, by Gozzoli in the chapel of the Palazzo Medici-
Riccardi, and by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the church of Santa
Maria Novella. Buon fresco painting is unsuited to the damp, cold
climate of northern countries, and there is now some concern for
the preservation of frescoes in the sulfurous atmosphere of even
many southern cities. Buon fresco was successfully revived by
the Mexican mural painters Diego Rivera, José Orozco,
 and Rufino Tamayo.

c. Sgraffito

Sgraffito (Italian graffiare, “to scratch”) is a form of fresco

painting for exterior walls. A rough plaster undercoat is followed
by thin plaster layers, each stained with a different lime-fast
colour. These coats are covered by a fine-grain mortar finishing
surface. The plaster is then engraved with knives and gouges at
different levels to reveal the various coloured layers beneath.
The sintered-lime process binds the colours. The surface of
modern sgraffito frescoes is often enriched with textures made
by impressing nails and machine parts, combined
with mosaics of stone, glass, plastic, and metal tesserae.

Sgraffito has been a traditional folk art in Europe since

the Middle Ages and was practiced as a fine art in 13th-century
Germany. It was revived in updated and modified ways by 20th-
century artists such as Max Ernst and Jean Dubuffet.
3. Oil
Oil paints are made by mixing dry pigment powder with refined linseed
oil to a paste, which is then milled in order to disperse the pigment
particles throughout the oil vehicle. According to the 1st-century
Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, whose writings the Flemish painters
Hubert and Jan van Eyck are thought to have studied, the Romans
used oil colours for shield painting. The earliest use of oil as a fine-art
medium is generally attributed to 15th-century European painters,
such as Giovanni Bellini and the van Eycks, who glazed oil colour over
a glue-tempera underpainting. It is also thought probable, however,
that medieval manuscript illuminators had been using oil glazes in
order to achieve greater depth of colour and more subtle tonal
transitions than their tempera medium allowed.

Oils have been used on linen, burlap, cotton, wood, hide, rock,
stone, concrete, paper, cardboard, aluminum, copper, plywood, and
processed boards, such as masonite, pressed wood, and hardboard.
The surface of rigid panels is traditionally prepared with gesso and that
of canvas with one or more coats of white acrylic resin emulsion or
with a coat of animal glue followed by thin layers of white-lead oil
primer. Oil paints can be applied undiluted to these prepared surfaces
or can be used thinned with pure gum turpentine or its substitute,
white mineral spirit. The colours are slow drying; the safest dryer to
speed the process is cobalt siccative.

An oil glaze is a transparent wash of pigment, traditionally thinned with

an oleoresin or with stand oil (a concentrate of linseed oil). Glazes can
be used to create deep, glowing shadows and to bring contrasted
colours into closer harmony beneath a unifying tinted film. Scumbling
is the technique of scrubbing an undiluted, opaque, and generally pale
pigment across others for special textural effects or to raise the key of
a dark-coloured area.

Hog-bristle brushes are used for much of the painting, with pointed,
red sable-hair brushes generally preferred for outlines and fine details.
Oils, however, are the most plastic and responsive of all painting
mediums and can be handled with all manner of tools. The later works
of Titian and Rembrandt, for example, appear to have been executed
with thumbs, fingers, rags, spatulas, and brush handles. With these
and other unconventional tools and techniques, oil painters create
pigment textures ranging from delicate tonal modulations to
unvarying, mechanical finishes and from clotted, impasto ridges of
paint to barely perceptible stains.

The tempera-underpainting-oil-glaze technique was practiced into the

17th century. Artists such as Titian, El Greco, Rubens, and Diego
Velázquez, however, used oil pigments alone and, employing a method
similar to pastel painting, applied them directly to the brownish ground
with which they had tinted the white priming. Contours and shadows
were stained in streaks and washes of diluted paint, while lighter areas
were created with dry, opaque scumbles, the tinted ground meanwhile
providing the halftones and often remaining untouched for passages of
local or reflected colour in the completed picture. This use of oil paint
was particularly suited to expressing atmospheric effects and to
creating chiaroscuro, or light and dark, patterns. It also encouraged a
bravura handling of paint, where stabs, flourishes, lifts, and pressures
of the brush economically described the most subtle changes of form,
texture, and colour according to the influence exerted by the tinted
ground through the varying thicknesses of overlaid pigment. This
method was still practiced by the 19th-century painters, such as John
Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Eugène Delacroix, and Honoré Daumier.
The Impressionists, however, found the luminosity of a brilliant white
ground essential to the alla prima technique with which they
represented the colour intensities and shifting lights of their plein
air (open air) subjects. Most oil paintings since then have been
executed on white surfaces.

The rapid deterioration of Leonardo’s 15th-century Last Supper (last

restored 1978–99), which was painted in oils on plaster, may have
deterred later artists from using the medium directly on a wall surface.
The likelihood of eventual warping also prohibited using the large
number of braced wood panels required to make
an alternative support for an extensive mural painting in oils.
Because canvas can be woven to any length and because an oil-
painted surface is elastic, mural paintings could be executed in the
studio and rolled and restretched on a wooden framework at the site or
marouflaged (fastened with an adhesive) directly onto a wall surface.
In addition to the immense studio canvases painted for particular sites
by artists such as Jacopo Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, Delacroix, Pierre-
Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, and Claude Monet, the use of canvas has
made it possible for mural-size, modern oil paintings to be transported
for exhibition to all parts of the world.

The tractable nature of the oil medium has sometimes encouraged

careless craftsmanship. Working over partly dry pigment or priming
may produce a wrinkled surface. The excessive use of oil as a vehicle
causes colours to yellow and darken, while cracking, blooming,
powdering, and flaking can result from poor priming, overthinning with
turpentine, or the use of varnish dryers and other spirits. Colour
changes may also occur through the use of chemically incompatible
pigment mixtures or from the fading of fugitive synthetic hues, such as
crimson lakes, the brilliant red pigment favoured by Pierre-Auguste
Renoir.