Oil Painting
[§ 83, Oil Painting, its Discovery and Early History, ante, p. 226.]
The bare fact of the invention of oil painting by John of Bruges, recorded by Vasari in 1550 in chapter VII of his ‘Introduction’ to Painting, is in the Life of Antonello da Messina, in the same edition, retold in the personal anecdotic vein that accords with Vasari’s literary methods. Here the ‘invention’ followed on the splitting of a particular tempera panel, varnished in oil, that according to traditional practice van Eyck had put out in the sun to dry. The said artist then turned his attention to devising some means for avoiding such mischances for the future, and, in Vasari’s words, ‘being not less dissatisfied with the varnish than with the process of tempera painting, he began to devise means for preparing a kind of varnish which should dry in the shade, so as to avoid having to place the pictures in the sun. Having made experiments with many things both pure and in compounds, he at last found that linseed and nut oil, among the many which he had tested, were more drying than all the rest. These therefore, boiled with other mixtures of his, made him the varnish which he had long desired.’ This varnish, Vasari goes on to say, he mixed with the colours and found that it ‘lit up the colours so powerfully that it gave a gloss of itself,’ without any after-coat of varnish.
If we ask What is the truth about this ‘invention’ of van Eyck, or of the brothers van Eyck (see ante, p. 226, note 1), the first answer of any one knowing alike the earlier history of the oil medium and Vasari’s anecdotal predilections would be ‘there was no invention at all.’ The drying properties of linseed and nut oil, and the way to increase these, had been known for hundreds of years, as had also the preparation of an oil varnish with sandarac resin. There is question too of a colourless spirit varnish, and of the process of mixing varnish with oil for a painting medium, in documents prior to the fifteenth century. The technique of oil painting is described by Theophilus, about 1100 A.D.; in the Hermeneia or Mount Athos Handbook; and in the Trattato of Cennini, while numerous accounts and records of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries establish incontestably, at any rate for the lands north of the Alps, the employment of oils and varnishes for artistic wall and panel painting. The epitaphs for the tombs of the two van Eycks make no mention of such a feat as Vasari ascribes to them, and it is quite open to any one to argue, as is the case with M. Dalbon in his recent Origines de la Peinture à l’Huile, Paris, 1904, that it was no special improvement in technique that brought the van Eycks their fame in connection with oil painting, but rather an artistic improvement that consisted in using a traditional process to execute pictures which in design, finish, beauty, and glow of colour, far surpassed anything previously produced in the northern schools. There is a good deal of force in this view, but at the same time it is impossible to deny to the van Eycks the credit of technical improvements. They had a reputation for this long before the time of Vasari. In 1456, fifteen years after the death of the younger brother Jan, Bartolomeo Facio of Spezia wrote a tract De Viris Illustribus in which he spoke of John van Eyck as specially ‘learned in those arts which contributed to the making of a picture, and on that account credited with the discovery of many things in the properties of colours, which he had learned from ancient traditions recorded by Pliny and other writers.’ The Florentine Filarete, c. 1464, knew of the repute of Jan van Eyck in connection with the oil technique. Hence we may credit the van Eycks with certain technical improvements on traditional practices and preparations in the oil technique, though these can hardly be termed the ‘invention of oil painting,’ while their artistic achievement was great enough to force into prominence whatever in the technical department they had actually accomplished.
The question of the exact technique of the van Eycks, in its relation to the oil practice before their time, is one that has occupied many minds, and is not yet satisfactorily settled. Most of those who have enunciated theories on the subject have proceeded by guess-work, and have suggested media and processes that may possibly have been used, but for the employment of which there is no direct evidence. The most recent suggestion is that of Principal Laurie of Edinburgh, and this is founded on scientific analysis. The experiments with oils and varnishes and other media, which this investigator has been carrying on for many years, have taught him that the most secure substance for ‘locking-up’ pigments as the phrase goes, that is for shielding them from the access of moisture or deleterious gases, is a resin, like our Canada balsam, that may be used as a varnish or painting medium when dissolved in an essential oil. As he believes he can detect in the van Eycks’ extant pictures pigments that would only have lasted had they been shielded by a preparation of the kind, he conjectures that the use of a natural pine balsam, with probably a small proportion of drying oil and rendered more workable by emulsifying with egg, may be the real secret of which so many investigators have been in search. For example, the green used for the robe of John Baptist and other figures in the ‘Adoration of the Lamb’ at Ghent can be matched, as we lately found by experiment, with verdigris (dissolved in pine balsam which is a much finer green than verdigris ground in oil) and yellow ochre or orpiment, and the only known way of rendering verdigris stable is to dissolve it in these pine balsams, according to a recipe that is actually preserved in the de Mayerne MS., which Berger has lately printed in full in the fourth Part of his Beiträge.
Be this as it may, one thing is certain, that the oil painting of the van Eycks and other painters of the early Flemish school did not differ greatly if at all in its artistic effect from the tempera that had preceded it, and that is described in the last note. Oil painting, in the sense that we attach to the term, is really the creation not of the Flemings, nor of the Florentines and other Italians who were the first to try experiments with the new Flemish process, but of Giovanni Bellini and the other Venetians who adopted the oil medium in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. According to Vasari, ante, p. 229, and Life of Antonello da Messina, Opere, II, 563 f., it was the last named artist who acquired the secret of the invention of van Eyck through a visit to Flanders, and brought it to Venice. Vasari has been proved to be wrong in the chronology he gives of the life of Antonello, who was born about 1444 and was therefore much younger than Vasari makes him, and many critics have been disposed to relegate his whole account of the Sicilian painter to the realm of myth. The most recent authority on the subject however, Dr von Wurtzbach, in his Niederländisches Künstler-Lexicon, vindicates Vasari’s accuracy in the main points of the visit to Flanders and the introduction of the new process at Venice, which event may be fixed about 1475. It was taken up with avidity by the Bellini and by other Venetians of the time, and it is to the younger Bellini more than to any other painter that is due the apprehension of the possibilities latent in the oil medium. Giovanni Bellini began to manipulate the oil pigments with a freedom and a feeling for their varied qualities of which earlier oil painters had possessed little idea, and the way was prepared for the splendid unfolding of the technique in the hands of Giorgione, Palma, and Titian.