Painting
Table of Contents
Introduction
Elements and principles of design
Techniques and methods
Mediums
Forms of painting
Imagery and subject matter
Symbolism
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, colours, 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 in order to represent real or supernatural phenomena, to interpret a narrative theme, or to create wholly abstract visual relationships. An artist�s decision to use a particular medium, such as tempera, fresco, oil, acrylic, watercolour 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 and the form, as well as the artist�s own 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 notion of the �fine artist� 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 can now reach an audience only through commercial galleries and public museums, although their work may be occasionally reproduced in art periodicals. They may also be assisted by financial awards or commissions from industry and the state. They have, 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 have combined other media, such as sculpture, with painting to produce three-dimensional abstract designs. Other artists have attached real objects to the canvas in collage fashion or used electricity to operate coloured kinetic panels and boxes. Conceptual artists frequently express their ideas in the form of a proposal for an unrealizable project, while performance artists are an integral part of their own compositions. The restless endeavour to extend the boundaries of expression in Western art produces continuous international stylistic changes. The often bewildering succession of new movements in painting is further stimulated by the swift interchange of ideas by means of international art journals, traveling exhibitions, and art centres.
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,
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 designLine
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.
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, those directing the eye downward evoke moods of sadness or defeat, while lines at angles opening to the right of a design are more agreeable and welcoming than those spreading outward to the left. 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
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. Colour
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. 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 great �primitive� 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, he must lower the overall tonal key of his design, thus intensifying the brightness value of his 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-Eug�ne 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. 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 C�zanne, 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.
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. 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.
Young children and untrained artists, however, do not understand space in this way and represent it conceptually. Their paintings, therefore, show objects and surroundings independently of one another and from the views that best present their most characteristic features. The notion of scale in their pictures is also subjective, the relative size of things being decided by the artist either by their degree of emotional significance for him or by their narrative importance in the picture (interest perspective).
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 C�zanne 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.
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
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.
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 (
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, more recently, 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 no 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; Andr� Derain, Fernand L�ger, Marc Chagall, Mikhail Larionov, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Hockney designed for the theatre; Joan Mir�, Pablo Picasso, and Chagall worked in ceramics; Georges Braque and Salvador Dal� designed jewelry; and Dal�, Hans Richter, and Andy Warhol made films. Many of these, with other modern painters, have also been sculptors and printmakers and have 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, �douard 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, the artist has decided the technique and working method best suited to his aims and temperament. 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 C�zanne 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
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 (
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 unsuitable for many modern paintings, where the artist�s intention is for his forms to appear to advance toward the spectator rather than be viewed by him as if through a wall aperture. In contemporary Minimal 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.
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.
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
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. Mid-to-late 20th-century artists such as Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, and David Hockney might have used tempera had it not been replaced mid-century by acrylic paints.
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. 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, Fran�ois Boucher, and Jean-Honor� Fragonard. 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
The
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, Jos� Orozco, and Rufino Tamayo.
Sgraffito (Italian
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. 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 Vel�zquez, 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, Eug�ne Delacroix, and Honor� 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
The tractable nature of the oil medium has sometimes encouraged slipshod 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. Watercolour
Watercolours are pigments ground with gum arabic and gall and thinned with water in use. Sable and squirrel (�camel�) hair brushes are used on white or tinted paper and card.
Three hundred years before the late 18th-century English watercolourists, German artist Albrecht D�rer anticipated their technique of transparent colour washes in a remarkable series of plant studies and panoramic landscapes. Until the emergence of the English school, however, watercolour became a medium merely for colour tinting outlined drawings or, combined with opaque body colour to produce effects similar to gouache or tempera, was used in preparatory studies for oil paintings.
The chief exponents of the English method were Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman, John Robert Cozens, Richard Parkes Bonington, David Cox, and Constable. Turner, however, true to his unorthodox genius, added white to his watercolour and used rags, sponges, and knives to obtain unique effects of light and texture. Victorian watercolourists, such as Birket Foster, used a laborious method of colour washing a monochrome underpainting, similar in principle to the tempera-oil technique. Following the direct, vigorous watercolours of the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, however, the medium was established in Europe and America as an expressive picture medium in its own right. Notable 20th-century watercolourists were Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Raoul Dufy, and Georges Rouault; the U.S. artists Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Maurice Prendergast, Charles Burchfield, John Marin, Lyonel Feininger, and Jim Dine; and the English painters John and Paul Nash.
In the �pure� watercolour technique, often referred to as the English method, no white or other opaque pigment is applied, colour intensity and tonal depth being built up by successive, transparent washes on damp paper. Patches of white paper are left unpainted to represent white objects and to create effects of reflected light. These flecks of bare paper produce the sparkle characteristic of pure watercolour. Tonal gradations and soft, atmospheric qualities are rendered by staining the paper when it is very wet with varying proportions of pigment. Sharp accents, lines, and coarse textures are introduced when the paper has dried. The paper should be of the type sold as �handmade from rags�; this is generally thick and grained. Cockling is avoided when the surface dries out if the dampened paper has been first stretched across a special frame or held in position during painting by an edging of tape. Ink
Ink is the traditional painting medium of China and Japan, where it has been used with long-haired brushes of wolf, goat, or badger on silk or absorbent paper. Asian black ink is a gum-bound carbon stick that is ground on rough stone and mixed with varying amounts of water to create a wide range of modulated tones or applied almost dry, with lightly brushed strokes, to produce coarser textures. The calligraphic brush technique is expressive of Zen Buddhist and Confucian philosophies, brush-stroke formulas for the spiritual interpretation of nature in painting dictating the use of the lifted brush tip for the �bone,� or �lean,� structure of things and the spreading belly of the hairs for their �flesh,� or �fat,� volumes. The East Asian artist poises the brush vertically above the paper and controls its rhythmic movements from the shoulder. Distant forms represented in landscapes painted on silk were sometimes brushed on from the reverse side.
In the Western world, ink has been used rather more for preparatory studies and topographical and literary illustrations than as a medium for easel paintings. Western artists have generally combined ink washes with contours and textures in quill or steel pen. Among the finest of these are by Rembrandt, Nicolas Poussin, Francisco Goya, Samuel Palmer, Constable, and �douard Manet. Claude Lorrain, Turner, and Daumier and, in the 20th century, Braque, Picasso, Reginald Marsh, Henri Michaux, and John Piper are some of those who have exploited its unique qualities. Modern artists also use ballpoint and felt pens. Gouache
Gouache is opaque watercolour, known also as poster paint and designer�s colour. It is thinned with water for applying, with sable- and hog-hair brushes, to white or tinted paper and card and, occasionally, to silk. Honey, starch, or acrylic is sometimes added to retard its quick-drying property. Liquid glue is preferred as a thinner by painters wishing to retain the tonality of colours (which otherwise dry slightly lighter in key) and to prevent thick paint from flaking. Gouache paints have the advantages that they dry out almost immediately to a matte finish and, if required, without visible brush marks. These qualities, with the capacities to be washed thinly or applied in thick impasto and a wide colour range that now includes fluorescent and metallic pigments, make the medium particularly suited to preparatory studies for oil and acrylic paintings. It is the medium that produces the suede finish and crisp lines characteristic of many Indian and Islamic miniatures, and it has been used in Western screen and fan decoration and by modern artists such as Rouault, Klee, Jean Dubuffet, and Morris Graves.
Encaustic painting (from the Greek: �burnt in�) was the ancient method, recorded by Pliny, of fixing pigments with heated wax. It was probably first practiced in Egypt about 3000 bce and is thought to have reached its peak in Classical Greece, although no examples from that period survive. Pigments, mixed with melted beeswax, were brushed onto stone or plaster, smoothed with a metal spatula, and then blended and driven into the wall with a heated iron. The surface was later polished with a cloth. Leonardo and others attempted unsuccessfully to revive the technique. American Indians" class="md-crosslink">North American Indians used an encaustic method whereby pigments mixed with hot animal fat were pressed into a design engraved on smoothed buffalo hide.
A simplified encaustic technique uses a spatula to apply wax mixed with solvent and pigment to wood or canvas, producing a ridged, impasto surface. This is an ancient and most durable medium. Coptic mummy portraits from the 1st and 2nd centuries ce retain the softly blended, translucent colouring typical of waxwork effigies. In the 19th century Vincent van Gogh also used this method to give body to his oil pigment; the Neo-Impressionist artist Louis Hayet applied encaustic to paper, and it was used by U.S. painter Jasper Johns for his iconic paintings of maps, targets, and flags. Coloured wax crayons have also been used by modern painters such as Picasso, Klee, Arshile Gorky, and Hockney. Casein
Casein, or �cheese painting,� is a medium in which pigments are tempered with the gluey curd of cheese or milk precipitate. For handling, an emulsion of casein and lime is thinned with water. The active element of casein contains nitrogen, which forms a soluble caseate of calcium in the presence of lime. It is applied in thin washes to rigid surfaces, such as cardboard, wood, and plastered walls.
Casein colours dry quickly, although lighter in tone than when first applied. Since they have more body than egg-tempera paints, they can be applied with bristle brushes to create impasto textures not unlike those of oils. Casein paints were used in ancient Rome. They are now available ready-made in tubes and have been used by such modern artists as Robert Motherwell and Claes Oldenburg.
Casein is also an ingredient of some charcoal and pastel fixatives and was a traditional primer for walls and panels. Synthetic mediums
Synthetic mediums, developed by industrial research, range from the Liquitex fabric dyes used on canvas by U.S. abstract painter Larry Poons to the house enamel paints employed at times by Picasso and Jackson Pollock.
The most popular medium and the first to challenge the supremacy of oils is acrylic resin emulsion, since this plastic paint combines most of the expressive capabilities of oils with the quick-drying properties of tempera and gouache. It is made by mixing pigments with a synthetic resin and thinning with water. It can be applied to any sufficiently toothed surface with brush, roller, airbrush, spatula, sponge, or rag. Acrylic paints dry quickly, without brush marks, to form a matte, waterproof film that is also elastic, durable, and easily cleaned. They show little colour change in drying, nor do they darken in time. While they lack the surface textural richness of oil or encaustic, they can be built up with a spatula into opaque impastos or thinned immediately into transparent colour glazes. Polyvinyl acetate (PVA) or synthetic gesso is applied for priming, although it is claimed that acrylic paints can be safely applied directly onto unprepared raw canvas or cotton. The wide range of intense hues is extended by fluorescent and metallic pigments. Polymer paints are particularly suitable for the precise, immaculate finish demanded by Op art, Minimalist, and Photo-realist painters such as Bridget Riley, Morris Louis, Frank Stella, and Richard Estes. Other mediumsFrench pastels
French pastels, with the sharpened lumps of pigment used by Ice Age artists, are the purest and most direct painting materials. Pastel pigments are mixed only with sufficient gum to bind them for drying into stick molds. Generally, they are used on raw strawboard or on coarse-grained tinted paper, although vellum, wood, and canvas have been also employed. These colours will not fade or darken, but, since they are not absorbed by the surface of the support, they lie as pigment powder and are easily smudged. Unfortunately, pastel colours lose their luminosity and tonality if fixed with a varnish and so are best preserved in deep mounts behind glass. Edgar Degas often overcame the fragile nature of true pastel painting by the unorthodox method of working on turpentine-soaked paper, which absorbed the powdery pigment.
Eighteenth-century portrait pastellists, such as Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Baptiste Peronneau, Jean-�tienne Liotard, Rosalba Carriera, and Anton Raphael Mengs, blended the pigment with coiled paper stumps so the surface resembled that of a smooth oil painting. Later pastel painters, such as Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Mary Cassatt, Everett Shinn, Odilon Redon, and Arthur Dove, contrasted broad masses of granular colour, spread with the side of the stick, with broken contours and passages of loose cross-hatching and smudging. They often used the tinted ground as a halftone, and, according to the amount of manual pressure exerted on the chalk, they varied the degree of pigment opacity to extract a wide range of tints and shades from each pastel colour.
Oil pastels are pigments ground in mastic with a variety of oils and waxes. They are used in a similar way to that of French pastels but are already fixed and harder, producing a permanent, waxy finish. Oil-pastel paintings are generally executed on white paper, card, or canvas. The colours can be blended if the surface of the support is dampened with turpentine or if they are overworked with turpentine. They are popular for small preparatory studies for paintings. Glass paintings
Glass paintings are executed with oil and hard resin or with watercolour and gum on glass sheets. These have been a folk art tradition in Europe and North America and, from the 15th to the 18th century, were regarded as a fine art in northern Europe, where they have been more recently revived by such painters as Willi Dirx, Ida Kerkovius, Lily Hildebrandt, Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, and Heinrich Campendonck. Colours are applied from the back in reverse order. Unpainted areas of glass are often coated with mercury, providing a mirror background to the coloured images. That treatment creates the kind of illusionary, bizarre spatial relationship between the viewer and picture space sought by Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto with his use of photographic images fixed to a polished steel sheet. The colours seen through glass appear translucent, jewel-like, and, since they cannot be touched, even magical. Ivory painting
Ivory painting was practiced in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and America for portrait miniatures. These were generally oval-shaped and designed as keepsakes, lockets, and mantle pictures. They were painted under a magnifying glass in fairly dry watercolour or tempera stippling, with sable- or marten-hair brushes on thin, semitranslucent ivory pieces. Corrections were made with a needle. The velvet quality of their colours was enhanced, on the thinner ivories, by the glow produced by a gold leaf or tinted backing. Lacquer
Lacquer has been a traditional Chinese medium for more than 2,000 years. It combines painting with intaglio relief. Linen-covered wood panels are coated with chalk or clay, followed by many thin layers of black or red lacquer tree resin. The surface is polished and a design engraved, which is then coloured and gilded or inset with mother-of-pearl. Layers of compressed paper or molded papier-m�ch� have also provided supports. In China and Japan, lacquer has been used principally for decorating shrine panels, screens, caskets, panniers (large baskets), and musical instruments.
Sand, or dry, painting is a traditional religious art of the North American Indians; it is still practiced in healing ceremonies among the Navajos of New Mexico and Arizona. Ground sandstone, natural ochres, mineral earths, and powdered charcoal are sprinkled onto a pattern marked into an area covered with yellow-white sand. The patient sits in the centre of this vivid symbolic design of coloured figurative and geometrical shapes. Following the ritual, the painting is destroyed. These �floor� pictures influenced Pollock in his horizontally spread action paintings. Paper
From the end of the 18th century, profiles and full-length group portraits were cut in black paper, mounted on white card, and often highlighted in gold or white. A silhouette (�shade�) might be first outlined from the sitter�s cast shadow with the aid of a physionotrace. American artist Kara Walker revived the silhouette technique with a series of controversial works that commented on race, gender, and class.
Collage was the Dada and Synthetic Cubist technique of combining labels, tickets, newspaper cuttings, wallpaper scraps, and other �found� surfaces with painted textures. Among the most lyrical and inventive works in this magpie medium are the so-called
The use of mechanical mediums in painting has run parallel to similar developments in modern music and drama. In the field of cybernetics, painters have programmed computers to permutate drawings, photographs, diagrams, and symbols through sequences of progressive distortion; and light patterns are produced on television screens by deliberate magnetic interference and by sound-wave oscillations. Artists have also explored the expressive and aesthetic possibilities of linear holograms, in which all sides of an object can be shown by superimposed light images. Painters are among those who have extended the boundaries of filmmaking as an art form. Examples include the Surrealist film fantasies created by Berthold Bartosch, Jean Cocteau, Hans Richter, and Salvador Dal�, by Schlemmer�s filmed ballets and Norman McLaren�s hand-painted abstract animations.
For some Conceptual artists, language was the medium. Words themselves�spelled out in neon or LED lights or projected on gallery or public walls�served as art for artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, and Jenny Holzer. Mixed mediums
Some pictures are first painted in one medium and corrected or enriched with colour and texture in another. Examples of this kind of mixed mediums are the Renaissance tempera-oil technique, William Blake�s relief etchings colour-printed in glue tempera and hand-finished in watercolour, and Degas�s overpainted monotypes and his combinations of pastel, gouache, and oil. More recent examples are Richard Hamilton�s photographs overpainted in oil colour, Dubuffet�s patchwork assemblages of painted canvas and paper, and Klee�s alchemy in mixing ingredients such as oil and distemper on chalk over jute and watercolour and wax on muslin stuck on wood.
Mural painting has its roots in the primeval instincts of people to decorate their surroundings and to use wall surfaces as a form for expressing ideas, emotions, and beliefs. In their universal manifestation in graffiti and in ancient murals, such as cave paintings and protodynastic Egyptian frescoes, symbols and representational images have been spread freely and indiscriminately across walls, ceilings, and floors. But, in more disciplined attempts to symbolize the importance and function of particular buildings through their interior decoration, murals have been designed for the restricted framework of specific surface areas. They therefore have to be painted in close relationship to the scale, style, and mood of the interior and with regard to such siting considerations as light sources, eye levels, the spectators� lines of sight and means of approach, and the emotive scale relationship between spectators and the painted images.
Early mural decorations for tombs, temples, sanctuaries, and catacombs were generally designed in horizontal divisions and vertical axes. These grid patterns were in harmony with the austere character of the interiors, and their geometrical plan enabled the artist to depict clearly the various episodes and symbols of a narrative subject. In these early traditions of mural design, in China, India, Mexico, Egypt, Crete, and Byzantium, no illusionary devices were used to deny the true flatness of the wall surface; images were silhouetted against a flatly painted ground framed by decorative dadoes (the decoration adorning the lower part of an interior wall) of stylized motifs in repeat patterns. By the early Renaissance, however, innovators such as Giotto, Masaccio, and Fra Angelico were placing figures within architectural and landscape settings, painted as if extensions to the real dimensions of the interior. The peak of technical skill and artistic expression was reached in the 15th and 16th centuries with the frescoes of Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, and Raphael. The irregular shapes of wall areas and the distortions produced by convex surfaces were inventively exploited in the design. Intruding doors and windows, for example, were skillfully circumvented by sweeping pattern rhythms or were incorporated as features in the painting, and figures were foreshortened so as to appear to float across or to rise into cupolas (rounded vaults that form ceilings), lunettes (rounded spaces over doors or windows), and apses (domed projections of a church, usually at the east end or altar), the curving surfaces of which might be painted to simulate celestial skies. Existing structural wall features provided the divisions between narrative episodes. These were often supplemented by trompe l�oeil (�deceive the eye�) columns, pilasters, arcading, balustrading, steps, and other architectural forms that also served to fuse the painted setting with the real interior.
With the increasing dependence upon tapestry hangings and stained glass as primary forms of interior decoration, mural painting suffered a decline in the Western world. Except for those given to Rubens, Tiepolo, Delacroix, and Puvis de Chavannes, there were relatively few important mural commissions in the period following the High Renaissance. In the 20th century, however, enlightened patronage occasionally enabled leading modern artists to execute paintings for specific sites: Monet�s
The easel, or studio, picture was a form developed during the Renaissance with the establishment of the painter as an individual artist. Its scale and portability enabled European artists to extend the range of themes, previously restricted to those suitable to mural decoration. Easel and panel forms include still life, portraiture, landscape, and genre subjects and permit the representation of ephemeral effects of light and atmosphere that the more intimate forms of Asian art had already allowed the painters of scrolls, screens, and fans to express. Although easel paintings are occasionally commissioned for a special purpose, they are generally bought as independent art objects and used as decorative focal features or illusionary window views in private homes. They are also collected as financial investment, for social prestige, for the therapeutic escapism their subject may provide, or purely for the aesthetic pleasure they afford.
Panel paintings, by strict definition, are small pictures designed for specific sacred or secular purposes or as part of a functional object. Although these wooden boards are sometimes categorized as a form of �decorative� rather than �fine� art, the best examples justify their place in museums alongside great easel paintings. Among the functions they originally served were as predellas (the facings to altar-step risers); devotional and ceremonial icons; portable, folding diptych and triptych altarpieces; shop and tavern signboards; mummy cases; and panel decorations of carriages, musical instruments, and cassoni. Many of them were painted by acknowledged masters, such as Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello, and Antoine Watteau, as well as by anonymous folk artists. Miniature painting
Miniature painting is a term applied both to Western portrait miniatures and to the Indian and Islamic forms of manuscript painting discussed below. Portrait miniatures, or limnings, were originally painted in watercolour with body colour on vellum and card. They were often worn in jewelled, enamelled lockets. Sixteenth-century miniaturists, such as Hans Holbein the Younger, Jean Clouet, Nicholas Hilliard, and Isaac Oliver, painted them in the tradition of medieval illuminators. Their flat designs, richly textured and minutely detailed, often incorporated allegorical and gilded heraldic motifs. In 17th- and 18th-century Western portrait miniatures, the two-dimensional pattern of rich colours was developed by atmospheric tonal modeling into more naturalistic representations; these were sometimes in pastel and pencil or painted in oils on a metal base. Pantographs (reducing and enlarging copying instruments made on the lazy-tongs lever principle) might be used to transfer a drawing. Among the exponents of this naturalistic style were Francisco Goya, Fragonard, Samuel Cooper, and Fran�ois Dumont. The introduction of painted ivory miniatures was followed, in the 19th century, by a decline in aesthetic standards, although a classical simplicity was achieved by unsophisticated itinerant limners and by the German miniaturist Patricius Kittner. The painted miniature was eventually superseded by the small, hand-tinted photograph.
Among the earliest surviving forms of manuscript painting are the papyrus rolls of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, the scrolls of Classical Greece and Rome, Aztec pictorial maps, and Mayan and Chinese codices, or manuscript books. European illuminated manuscripts were painted in egg-white tempera on vellum and card. Their subjects included religious, historical, mythological, and allegorical narratives, medical treatises, psalters, and calendars depicting seasonal occupations. In contrast to the formalized imagery of Byzantine and early Gothic manuscript painters, Celtic illuminators developed a unique, abstract style of elaborate decoration, the written text being overwhelmed by intricate latticework borders, with full-page initial letters embraced by interlacing scrolls. The medieval Gothic style of illumination, in sinuous, linear patterns of flattened forms isolated against white or gilded grounds, had developed, by the end of the 15th century, into exquisitely detailed, jewel-like miniatures of shaded figures and spatial landscapes. These were often framed by gilded initial letters as vignettes or by margin borders in simulated half relief. With the advent of printing in the 15th century and a final, brilliant period of Flemish and Italian illumination, European manuscript painting survived only in official documents, maps, and in the form of hand-coloured, block-printed pages. Pennsylvanian-German birth and baptismal certificates in the U.S. and William Blake�s hand-coloured engravings to the Bible and to his own poems were isolated revivals of those forms.
Indian and Islamic miniature painting, however, was practiced into the 19th century; and 11th-century Asian albums of poem paintings in ink, on leaves of silk or paper, represent a tradition that was continued into modern times. The subjects of Middle Eastern miniatures included religious and historical narrative, cosmic maps, and medical, palmistry, and astrological charts, as well as illustrations to poems, songs, and romantic epics. These were generally painted in gouache on paper, with occasional gold- or silver-leaf embellishment. The linear design was first drawn with a brush in delicate contours and soft shading. Landscape and architectural detail was as well observed as in that of the principal figures.
The rapprochement established between text, painted borders, margin spaces, and illustration is characteristic of both Eastern and Western manuscript paintings. In Indian and Islamic miniatures, for example, the panels of decorative script are integrated within the overall pattern as areas of textural enrichment; and, with the margin and inset frames, these panels serve also as concrete screens and prosceniums to the action depicted, the participants in the narrative episode making their exits and entrances across or behind them. Scroll painting
Hand scrolls, traditional to China and Japan, are ink paintings on continuous lengths of paper or silk. They are unrolled at arm�s length and viewed from right to left. These generally represent panoramic views of rivers, mountain and urban landscapes, and domestic interiors. They also illustrate romantic novels, Daoist and Buddhist themes, and historical and genre subjects. Narrative poetic commentaries were included as integral textures in the flowing design. The scrolls are remarkable for their vitality, the lyrical representation of atmospheric space, and for the rising and dipping viewpoints that anticipate the zooming motion-picture camera. The earliest surviving scrolls, such as Gu Kaizhi�s
Folding screens and screen doors originated in China and Japan, probably during the 12th century (or possibly earlier), and screen painting continued as a traditional form into the 20th. They are in ink or gouache on plain or gilded paper and silk. Their vivid rendering of animals, birds, and flowers and their atmospheric landscapes brought nature indoors. In some screens each panel was designed as an individual painting, while in others a continuous pattern flowed freely across the divisions. Japanese screens were often painted in complementary yin and yang pairs. Large 12-panel Chinese coromandel lacquer screens were imported into Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. French Rococo boudoir screens depicting
Rigid fans are depicted in the paintings and reliefs of ancient Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and Rome, but the oldest surviving specimens are the round and folding fans from East Asia. These were painted in India ink and colour on paper, card, and silk, the ground often sprinkled with gold dust or laid with gold or silver leaf. Spread freely across the mount, a calligraphic design depicted seasonal landscapes, genre scenes, and bird, flower, and animal motifs, with accompanying poems and commentaries. Leading Asian painters produced much of their finest work in this form. In Europe, however, where fan painting had been rarely practiced until the 17th century, it was considered a minor art, and designs were often based on frescoes and easel paintings. The richest and most elegant of these were painted in France and Italy during the 18th century. Watercolour and gouache paintings and hand-coloured engraved designs were made on paper, card, kid, and gauze. Allegories and romantic pastoral landscapes were frequently designed as separate vignettes, linked by floral swags and border scrolls. Both sides of the mount might be painted. The guards and sticks of the spoke framework were in delicately carved wood or ivory, inlaid with gold leaf or mother-of-pearl. Round hand-screens of parchment, mounted on handles like lollipops, were popular in early 19th-century English society. Charles Conder was a notable fin de si�cle (�end of the century,� characterized by effete sophistication) fan painter, and, in the early 20th century, Oskar Kokoschka decorated a lively set of fans on an autobiographical narrative theme.
Panoramas were intended to simulate the sensation of scanning an extensive urban or country view or seascape. This form of painting was popular at the end of the 18th century. Notable examples are
The concept of painting as a medium for creating illusions of space, volume, texture, light, and movement on a flat, stationary support was challenged by many modern artists. Some late 20th-century forms, for example, blurred the conventional distinctions between the mediums of sculpture and painting. Sculptors such as David Smith, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Philip Sutton made multicoloured constructions; painters such as Jean Arp and Ben Nicholson created abstract designs in painted wood relief, and Richard Smith painted on three-dimensional canvas structures the surfaces of which curl and thrust toward the spectator. And, rather than deny the essential flatness of the painting support by using traditional methods of representing volume and texture, Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Dine attached real objects and textures to the painted surface, and Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland designed their irregularly shaped canvases to be seen as explicitly flat art objects. Rejecting earlier painting methods of reproducing effects of light with tonal contrasts and broken pigment colour, some artists made use of neon tubes and mirrors. Instead of simulating sensations of movement by optical illusion, others designed kinetic panels and boxes in which coloured shapes revolved under electric power. The traditional definition of painting as a visual, concrete art form was questioned by Conceptual art, in which the painter�s idea might be expressed only in the form of documented proposals for unrealized and often unrealizable projects. In performance art and happenings, which employed techniques akin to those used in theatre, the artists themselves became a kind of medium.
The imagery and subject matter of paintings in early cultures were generally prescribed by tribal, religious, or dynastic authorities. In some Eastern countries, traditional models survived into the 18th century and even later. With the Renaissance, however, images and themes in Western painting, reflecting the new spirit of humanistic, objective curiosity and scientific research, came to be decided by the artist and his patron and, in later periods, by the artist alone. Kinds of imagery
Within the various cultures the art of representing things by painted images has rarely shown a continuously developing pattern toward greater realism. More often, religious and philosophical precepts have determined the degree of naturalism permitted. Rules governing portrayals of the human figure have been particularly stringent in certain traditions of representational painting, reflecting different attitudes to the cosmic significance of humans. For example, a belief in human inferiority in relation to an almighty deity is expressed in the faceless figures of early Jewish painting and in the stylizations of Byzantine imagery; and human insignificance against the dynamic forces of nature is symbolized in Chinese landscape paintings by man�s puny scale within a monumental setting. An earlier view, which instead sought to glorify the spiritual, intellectual, and physical attributes of humankind, is typified in the noble figures of Greco-Roman art and in the renewed celebration of human physical beauty in the Renaissance and subsequent Neoclassical styles. The uniqueness of humans among living things and the expression of individual physical and emotional characteristics are exemplified in Japanese and northern European narrative and genre painting. Concomitant with the antipathy toward figurative representation in some cultures was a general distaste for the portrayal of all things of the exterior world, animals, landscape features, and other natural forms rarely appearing except as stylized images signifying spiritual forces of good and evil. The representational imagery of modern painting borrows freely from ancient and contemporary sources such as untrained and child art, Classical mythology, commercial advertising, press photography, and the allegories and fantasies of the motion picture and the comic strip. Nonrepresentational imagery is not restricted to modern painting but appears also in earlier forms such as Aurignacian (Paleolithic) decorative meanders, the scrollwork of Celtic illuminations, and the patterns of Islamic Kūfic calligraphy (an angular variety of the Arabic alphabet). And the abstraction of natural forms into rudimentary symbols, characteristic of modern painting, is echoed in the �pin-men� conventions of Magdalenian caves, in Aztec pictograms, and Indian and Tibetan cosmic-diagram paintings. Kinds of subject matterDevotional
The range and interpretation of subjects in different forms of devotional painting express a particular attitude to the relationship between man and God. Early Christian and Buddhist murals, for example, portrayed an all-powerful, remote, and mysterious being, painted as a flat, formalized head or figure whose stern gaze dominated the interiors of temples, churches, and sanctuaries. Christian Last Judgments and Buddhist hell paintings were intended to frighten believers, while subjects such as the Virgin enthroned, the Assumption, and Buddha descending from Paradise sustained their faith with hopes for salvation and rewards of blissful immortality. Narrative
When the autocratic ecclesiastical control over Western painting weakened under Renaissance humanism, the religious narrative picture became a window onto a terrestrial rather than a celestial world. Both emotional and physical relationships between the figures depicted were realistically expressed, and the spectator was able to identify himself with the lifelike representation of a worldly space inhabited by Christ, his disciples, and saints, wearing updated dress and moving naturally within contemporary settings. This kind of narrative interpretation persists in the modern religious paintings of Sir Stanley Spencer, where biblical environments are represented by the clipped hedgerows, the churchyards, and the front parlours of his neat, native English village of Cookham.
Possibly the highest achievements in narrative illustrations to poetry and literature are found in Eastern miniatures and Asian scrolls, such as the Persian paintings of Ferdowsī�s 11th-century national epic poem, the
Ancient Greek and Roman mythologies have provided Western artists with rich sources of imagery and subject matter and with opportunities for painting the nude. Historical narrative painting includes Classical mythology and heroic legend, as well as the representation of contemporary events; examples include Benjamin West�s
The earliest surviving portraits of particular persons are probably the serene, idealized faces painted on the front and inside surfaces of dynastic Egyptian sarcophagi. The human individuality of the Roman mummy portraits of the 1st and 2nd century ad, however, suggests more authentic likenesses. Although portraits are among the highest achievements in painting, the subject poses special problems for the artist commissioned to paint a notable contemporary. The portraits of patrons by artists such as Raphael, Rubens, Hyacinthe Rigaud, Antoine-Jean Gros, Jacques-Louis David, and Sir Thomas Lawrence were required to express nobility, grace, and authority, just as the sultans and rajahs portrayed on frontispieces to Persian and Indian illuminated books and albums had understandably to be flattered as benevolent despots. Such concessions to the sitter�s vanity and social position seem to have been disregarded, however, in the convincing likenesses by more objective realists such as Robert Campin, D�rer, Jan van Eyck, Vel�zquez, Goya, and Gustave Courbet. Probably the finest are the self-portraits and studies of ordinary people by Rembrandt and van Gogh, where psychological insight, emotional empathy, and aesthetic values are fused. A more decorative approach to the subject is seen in the flattened portraits by Holbein, the Elizabethan and itinerant na�ve U.S. limners, and the East Asian paintings of ancestors, poets, priests, and emperors. Like these paintings, the full-length portraits by Boucher, Gainsborough, Kees van Dongen, and Matisse display as much regard for the texture and form of their sitters� dress as for their facial features.
Photography changed the practice of portraiture in painting for much of the 20th century, except where artists such as C�zanne and Braque used it as a subject for structural research or�like Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and Francis Bacon�for the expression of a personal vision beyond the scope of the camera. In roughly the last third of the 20th century, however, a number of painters, including Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Francesco Clemente, Chuck Close, and Alex Katz, again took up portraiture. Genre
Landscape
Still life
The earliest European still-life painting is usually attributed to Jacopo de� Barbari (i.e.,
Since ancient times, animals and birds have provided the primary subject matter of a painting or have been included in a design for their symbolic importance. In the paintings of prehistoric caves and dynastic Egyptian tombs, for example, animals are portrayed with a higher degree of naturalism than human figures. Their texture, movement, and structure have provided some artists with a primary source of inspiration: the classical, anatomical grace of a George Stubbs racehorse and a more romantic interpretation in the ferocious energy of a Rubens and G�ricault stallion; the vivid expression of rhythmically co-ordinated movements of deer by Tawaraya Sotatsu and Antonio Pisanello; the weight and volume of George Morland�s pigs and Paul Potter�s cows; the humanized creatures of Gothic bestiaries and of Edward Hicks�s
Increasing interest is shown in notable painters� versions of other artists� works. These are not academic copies (such as the study made by Matisse, when a student, of Chardin�s
In an abstract painting, ideas, emotions, and visual sensations are communicated solely through lines, shapes, colours, and textures that have no representational significance. The subject of an abstract painting may be therefore a proposition about the creative painting process itself or exclusively about the formal elements of painting, demonstrating the behaviour of juxtaposed colours and shapes and the movements and tensions between them, their optical metamorphosis and spatial ambiguities. Many abstracts, however, are more than visual formal exercises and produce physical and emotional reactions in the spectator to illusions of shapes and colours that appear to rise and fall, recede and advance, balance and float, disintegrate and re-form; or of moods created of joy, sadness, peace, or foreboding; or of effects produced by light or by flickering or throbbing movement. Some abstracts evoke the atmosphere of a particular time, place, or event; and then their titles may be significant:
Most early cultures developed iconographic systems that included prescriptions for the site, design, function, form, medium, subject matter, and imagery of their painting. The siting of early Byzantine murals, for instance, echoed the symbolic, architectural planning of the basilica. Thus, a stylized, linear image of Christ, surrounded by heavenly hosts, occupied the central dome; the Virgin was represented in the apse; and stiff figures of apostles, prophets, martyrs, and patriarchs occupied the aisle walls. The format of early devotional paintings was also prescribed, Christian and Buddhist deities being placed in the focal centre of the design, above the eye level of the audience and larger than surrounding figures. And, in the conventional arrangement of a Christian subject such as the Holy Trinity, a central, bearded, patriarchal God, flanked by archangels, presented Christ on the cross; between them was a dove, representing the Holy Spirit. In a rendering of the risen Christ, the Son faced the audience, with the Virgin Mother on the left and St. John on the right of the design. In East Asia a traditional format depicted Buddha on a lotus throne or in a high chariot drawn by oxen across clouds, surrounded by figures representing the planets. Deities generally appear against undefined grounds of white (signifying eternity or nothingness), blue (the celestial vaults), or gold (representing heavenly light by radiating lines or the spiritual aura by a nimbus). The elaborate surface preparation of supports and the painstaking execution with the finest materials symbolized the intention that paintings dedicated to a deity should last forever. The imagery, subject matter, and form might also have a mystical function: the realistic rendering of animals in contrast to the perfunctory human representations in Ice Age rock paintings, thought to signify a wishful guarantee for success in hunting; the earthly pleasures depicted on ancient Egyptian tomb murals intended to secure their continuance for the deceased; and the North American Indian sand paintings designed for magic healing ceremonies and the Tantric (relating to Tantrism, a school of Mahayana Buddhism) mandalas used for meditation and enlightenment.
Symbolism in Eastern painting�intended to deepen the experience of a picture�s mood and spirituality�is more generalized and poetic than in Western art. Both the execution and the subject matter of Buddhist Chinese and Japanese painting have a religious or metaphysical significance: the artist�s intuitive, calligraphic brush movements symbolizing his mystical empathy with nature and his cyclic landscape and flower subjects expressing his belief in the spiritual harmony of natural forms and forces. Much of Indian symbolism is visually emotive, images such as snakes, plantain leaves, twining creepers, and rippling water being overtly sexual. And, although symbolic attributes and colour codes identify Indian mythological characters (for example, the four arms of the terrible goddess Kali and the blue skin of the divine lover Krishna), the formal character and colour scheme of settings generally reflect the narrative�s emotional mood (for example, vibrant, dark-blue, cloudy skies and embracing, purple-black glades evoking amorous anticipation and red grounds expressing the passions of love or war).
Western symbolic systems, however, are more intellectually directed, their imagery having precise literary meanings and their colour codes intended primarily for narrative or devotional identification. The iconographic programs of the early Christian churches, for example, laid down complex formulas for the viewpoints, gestures, facial expressions, and positions of arms, hands, and feet for religious figures. An elaborate Ethiopian Christian iconographic system was followed until very recently, and elsewhere traditional methods survive of identifying archangels and saints by their attributes and by the symbols of martyrdom that they display: distinguishing white-bearded St. Peter from black-bearded St. Paul, for example, and portraying St. Catherine with a wheel and St. Bartholomew with a knife and skin. Christian iconography adopted and elaborated Greco-Roman and Jewish symbolic imagery: the pagan signs of the vine and the fish, for example, and the image of Christ as the Good Shepherd based on the Greek Hermes Kriophoros. Medieval and Renaissance writings define an immense vocabulary of symbolic images, such as the crescent, sea urchin, and owl signifying heresy, the toad and jug representing the devil, and the egg and bagpipes as erotic symbols (all of which appear in Hieronymus Bosch�s 15th-century narrative moralities). Angels and devils, hellfire and golden paradise, heavenly skies and birds in flight representing spirituality and rebirth are examples of the similarity of symbolic meaning for many religious, mythological, and allegorical traditions. The significance of images common to several cultures, however, may also be very different: the dragon representing avarice in European medieval allegory symbolizes friendliness in Japanese Zen painting; and the snake, symbol of temptation and eroticism in the West, signifies, by its skin shedding, the renewal of life in East Asian iconography.
Citation Information
Article Title: Painting
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 28 January 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/art/painting
Access Date: August 24, 2019
Additional Reading General reference
Both Kimberley Reynolds with Richard Seddon,
Good surveys of the subject include Frederick Malins,
Standard works on most painting materials, supports, surfaces, and techniques include Ralph Mayer,
William G. Archer,
E.H. Gombrich,
Howard Daniel,
Erwin Panofsky,
Irma A. Richter (ed.),