Art Tour
Technique: Colors
Painters didn't go to a paint store. They made their own; always had. Making paint is tricky business. It involved a wide-ranging knowledge of various plants and minerals, solvents, use of heat, and so on. This in turn meant having business connections with people who could supply the necessary materials. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that the painters of Florence, for example, were members not of a Painters Guild (there was no such thing) but of the Apothecaries Guild.
Anyway, the knowledge of raw materials, the business connections, the various techniques for producing not only colors but consistencies of paint, paint for wood versus paint for fresco and so on, all these were trade secrets of each artist's shop. In the late Middle Ages there came radical innovations in this area. New materials were discovered for making certain colors (red, for example, which had always been rare) and even for making new kinds of paint (oil paint was invented during our period).
Before we look at the new product, though, I thought we could have a look at the older styles. A couple of things are worth pointing out here. Most prominent is the use of gold. Most paintings were done for churches or monasteries, and these institutions were concerned in part that their paintings should be as glorious as possible. Just as altars and baptismal fonts and crucifixes should be adorned with gold and precious gems, so also should the religious art. So you'll see a good deal of gold paint and gold leaf, as you do in this painting of the Madonna with Child. This has a secondary effect of making paintings rather stiff and formal, as gold is hardly a good medium to paint with.
A second point is that certain colors were rare—a royal blue, for one, and scarlet for another—and so sometimes you will find these colors appear with peculiar prominence. In other words, the colors weren't chosen with an eye to naturalness but rather with an eye to display.
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