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.

ENRICHED FAÇADES.

[§§ 90–92, ante, p. 240 f.]

The external decorations, of which Vasari writes in chapters XI, XII, and XIII of his ‘Introduction’ to Painting, have come down to us in a very dilapidated condition, but there are still to be seen specimens of all the work he there describes, as well as of the decorative carvings in stone noticed in the ‘Introduction’ to Architecture, under the head of Travertine (at Rome) § 12, Istrian stone (at Venice) § 15, and Pietra forte (at Florence) § 17; ante, pp. 51, 56, 60. The most common technique is monochrome painting ‘a fresco’ on the plaster, and a good deal that passes as sgraffito is really only painted work in which there is no relief. One of the best existing displays is that on the façade of the Palazzo Ricci, at Rome, a little to the west of the Palazzo Farnese. Here on the top floor are painted trophies of armour in bronze colour (ante, p. 241) with grotesques (ante, p. 244) in yellow and brown on the story below. On the _piano nobile_ there is a frieze of figures in grisaille monochrome, with some single figures on a larger scale between the windows. Above the door is another frieze of figures on a black ground. More extensive, but less varied and not so well preserved, are the figure compositions on the back of the Palazzo Massimi, in the Piazza dei Massimi, at Rome, where the whole wall is covered with figure monochromes on a large scale on dark grounds. There are many more fragmentary specimens, as in the Via Maschera d’ Oro, No. 7; the Via Pellegrino, No. 66, etc. The work of Maccari, _Roma, Graffiti e Chiaroscuri, Secolo XV, XVI_, gives a large collection of reproductions of work that has now to a great extent perished.

Sgraffito-work, in which the effect is produced by differences of plane in the plaster itself (see ante, p. 243), resists the weather much better than mere painting, but it takes longer to execute and was not so much used as the more rapidly wrought fresco. The Palazzo Montalvo, in the Borgo degli Albizzi at Florence, offers a good example of a compromise. The work, at any rate in the lower part, is not true sgraffito as the plaster in the backgrounds is not scraped away, but the outlines of the figures and ornaments are marked by lines incised in the plaster, the brush, with light and dark tints, accomplishing the rest. On the other hand the house of Bianca Capello, 26 in the Via Maggio, is decorated in the true sgraffito technique as described by Vasari, ante, p. 243. The same may be said of a house in Rome, Via Maschera d’ Oro, No. 9, where the difference of the two planes of plaster is about an eighth of an inch. This work is clogged up with buff lime-wash and would be worth cleaning, as it seems in fair preservation.

Of modelled stucco figure designs and grotesques the Cortile of the Palazzo Spada, near the Campo di Fiore at Rome, presents the most extensive display. A more interesting piece of work will however be found not far away in the Via de’ Banchi Vecchi, Nos. 22–24, the house of the goldsmith Pietro Crivelli of Milan, of the first half of the sixteenth century. Here between the windows of the first floor are boldly designed trophies of arms carved in travertine, while between and above the windows of the second floor there are figures and grotesques effectively modelled in stucco. These are outlined with an incised line in the stucco and there is no colour. For free but not over-florid Renaissance enrichment the façade is noteworthy. The abundant stone carving at Florence in the form of the ‘stemmi’ has been already referred to, ante, p. 61.

STUCCO ‘GROTESQUES.’

[§ 92, _Grotesques or fanciful devices painted or modelled on walls_, ante, p. 244.]

Vasari touches on the subject of plaster work in all three ‘Introductions,’ to Architecture (§ 29), to Sculpture (§ 73) and to Painting (§ 92). In the former passages he deals with the material itself and with what may be called its utilitarian employment; in the last he has in view the artistic forms into which the material can be moulded, and which he calls by the curious name ‘grotesques.’ What these ‘grotesques’ are will presently be seen, but it is worth while first casting a glance back on the artistic use of plaster in its historical aspects.

It is not a little remarkable that although all the great ancient nations were familiar with this material, it was not till the late Greek and Greco-Roman periods that any general use was made of it as an independent vehicle of artistic effect. The Egyptians coated their walls with plaster of exquisite quality, which they brought to a fine, almost a polished, surface for their tempera paintings. The inhabitants of Mesopotamia protected their mud-brick walls with thin coats of lime plaster, sometimes only about a quarter of an inch in thickness but perfect in durability and weather-resisting properties. The Phoenicians at Carthage plastered the interior walls of their tombs, and the expression ‘whited sepulchres’ shows that Jewish tombs were coated in the same fashion. All through the historical period of Greek art plaster was at the command of the architect, to cover, and fill up inequalities in, the rough stone of which so many of the Hellenic temples were built, and fragments of the pre-Persian buildings of the Athenian Acropolis, still preserved on the rock, show how finely finished and how adhesive was this stucco film. So far as we know however none of the peoples just named seem to have modelled in the material, or used it for any of the decorative purposes for which the Greeks at any rate employed so largely the material of burnt clay. The exception is in the case of the older Aegean peoples, for the Cretans of Knossos made, as all the world now knows, a most effective artistic use of modelled stucco. This Aegean work may be connected technically with Egypt, for in the latest Egyptian period a considerable use was made of modelled plaster for sepulchral purposes, in the form of mummy-cases in which the features of the deceased, with headdress, jewels, etc., were represented in this material. The technique may go back in Egypt to the remoter times and may have been carried thence to the Aegean lands. The process however was apparently not inherited by the historical Greeks, who did not begin to use plaster freely and artistically till the later Hellenistic or Greco-Roman period.

Some late Greek private houses of the second or first century B.C., on Delos, show a beginning of modelled plaster work in the form of drafted ashlar stones imitated in the material, and it may be conjectured that the technique was developed at Alexandria, for the earliest existing mature works in the style, the famous stucco reliefs and mouldings found near the Villa Farnesina at Rome, resemble in many respects the so-called ‘Hellenistic’ reliefs, with landscape motives, that are ascribed to the school of Alexandria. In these stuccoes, now preserved in the Terme Museum at Rome, there are bands of enrichment stamped with wooden moulds, after the fashion described by Vasari in the ‘Introduction’ to Sculpture, § 73, that enclose fields wherein figure compositions with landscape adjuncts, or single figures, have been modelled by hand. Many of these last are of great beauty of form, and the whole have been executed with the lightest but firmest touch and the most delightful freedom. Some ceiling decorations in two tombs on the Via Latina, of the second century A.D., are almost as good in execution, and are interesting as giving in typical form ancient models that have been much copied at the Renaissance and in more modern times.

Early Christian artists, both in the West and in the East kept up the artistic use of stamped or modelled stucco. The Arabs inherited the technique, and at Cairo, and in the East and in Spain, they made a very extensive and tasteful use of the tractable material in their own style of artistic decoration. This style, like that of Byzantium, from which in great part it was derived; and that of the familiar Indian work in the exquisite marble-dust plaster or chunam, is chiefly surface decoration, without much plastic feeling, and relying mainly on geometrical, or at any rate inorganic, motives and forms. Bold modelling of forms accentuated by light and shade, as we are kindly informed by Dr James Burgess, does occur in old Buddhist work in northern India, and some excellent examples have recently been published in _Ancient Khotan_ (Chinese Turkistan) Oxford, 1907, vol. I, p. 587 and pl. liii ff. The work however belongs essentially to the West rather than to the East, and the middle ages in Western Europe produced some remarkable works in this style. There is some modelled stuccowork of early date in the Baptistry at Ravenna, but the most interesting examples of the period in Italy are the large figures of saints and the archivolt enriched with very bold and effective vine scrolls, that are to be seen in the interior of the little oratory of S. Maria in Valle (or Peltrude’s chapel) at Cividale in Friuli. These very remarkable works, with which may be connected the stuccoes of the altar ciborium at S. Ambrogio, Milan, date about 1100, and may be paralleled by similar figures, equally plastic in treatment, and of about the same period, north of the Alps, in St. Michael’s at Hildesheim. Signor Cattaneo calls the Cividale work ‘Byzantine,’ but life-sized plastically-treated figures in high relief represent a form of decorative art that was not practised at Byzantium, and the work, like a good deal else that is too lightly dubbed ‘Byzantine,’ is no doubt of western origin, and is a proof that the tradition of modelling in plaster was handed down without a break through the mediaeval period.

At the Renaissance the tradition was revived, and this style of decoration was developed in Tuscany and North Italy, while one of its most conspicuous triumphs was the adornment by Italian artists in the first half of the sixteenth century of the Galerie François Premier and Escalier du Roi at Fontainebleau in France. It spread also to our own country, where artists of the Italian school carried out work in the same thoroughly plastic style in the now destroyed palace of Nonsuch, under the patronage of Henry VIII.

This is not however the style that Vasari has in view when he speaks of ‘stucco grotesques.’ What he means is an imitation of ancient stamped and modelled plaster decoration, of the type of that represented in the tombs on the Via Latina just referred to. Here the scale is small, though the work may cover large spaces, and the design is on the whole of a light and fanciful kind. The impulse to it dates from the early years of the sixteenth century when considerable discoveries were made at Rome, in the Baths of Titus and elsewhere, of antique apartments or sepulchral chambers decorated in this fashion. As these interiors, when discovered, were all underground they were called ‘caves’ or ‘grottoes,’ and for this reason, as Benvenuto Cellini informs us in the 6th chapter of his _Autobiography_, the decoration characteristic of them was called ‘grotesque.’ The fact that the designs were so commonly of the fantastic or so-called ‘Pompeian’ order has given to the word ‘grotesque’ its modern meaning of bizarre or semi-ludicrous.

According to Vasari, the painter Morto da Feltro (c. 1474–c. 1519) was the first to study these antique decorations. ‘Our first thanks and commendations’ he says (_Opere_, ed. Milanesi, V, 205 f.) ‘are due to Morto, who was the first to discover and restore the kind of painting called “arabesques” and “grotesques,” seeing that they were for the most part hidden among the subterraneous portions of the ruins of Rome, whence he brought them, devoting all his study to this branch of art.’ He spent many months also, Vasari tells us, at Tivoli among the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa, and made a journey to Pozzuoli near Naples, all on the same quest. Stucco reliefs in this revived antique style were used at the beginning of the sixteenth century by Pinturicchio in the Appartamenti Borgia in the Vatican, and from that time onwards they become exceedingly common.

TARSIA WORK, OR WOOD INLAYS.

[§ 100, _Inlays in Wood_, ante, p. 262.]

The covering of one kind of material by another, for reasons of a constructive or an aesthetic kind, is so primitive and so universal that Gottfried Semper made it the fundamental principle of decoration in general, and developed this view in his famous ‘Bekleidungstheorie,’ which dominates _der Stil_. Semper’s philosophy of art was sufficiently profound for him to see that this process is not to be accused of insincerity because the more costly or beautiful material appears only on the outside, while the mass of the structure may be of commoner fabric. The materials in question are as a rule limited in quantity and it would be bad economy to employ them in positions where their beauty would not be seen. To build a thick wall of rare finely-veined and coloured marble in solid blocks would be to behave like degenerate Roman Emperors. Such material is far more suitably treated when it is exposed in thin layers over as large a superficial area as possible. Hence though there is nothing in the world to equal the fine ‘isodomon’ masonry of the earlier Greeks, which is the same throughout, there is much to be said in justification of the late Greek and Roman technique, so largely used in mediaeval Italy, of incrusting a common material with one of finer grain and colour.

In the case of wood inlays, it may be claimed for the craft that it originates in material need and not in any aesthetic considerations. Wood, of which the grain always runs one way, needs sometimes to be overlaid, braced, and prevented from warping by a slip of the same material placed with the grain at right angles to the first, after the fashion seen in our common drawing-boards. The great variety in colours and markings shown by different woods must however at a very early date have led to the employment of inlays and veneers for reasons of artistic effect, and in this craft the old Oriental peoples were proficient. It is worthy of notice that some Greek wood inlays have survived, and may be seen in the Kertch room at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The motives of all early inlays are either geometrical patterns or simple conventional ornament, like the olive sprays which are represented in the Greek work just mentioned. In these forms the craft was preserved through the mediaeval period, and though in the West, at any rate north of the Alps, the mediaeval epoch was one in which ornamentation was plastic rather than graphic, that is to say, in carving more often than in inlay, yet in Moorish lands, and in parts of Italy, inlays, both in stone and wood, were freely developed.

The history of Italian tarsia work takes a new start with the beginning of the Renaissance, and it became as Bode has termed it ‘a true child of the art of the Quattrocento’ or fifteenth century. The earliest examples seem to be in geometrical schemes, influenced by the so-called ‘Cosmati’ work, or inlays of small pieces of coloured stones and gilded pastes, so common in Italy from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. The painted borders to the frescoes of Giotto and other pre-Renaissance masters imitate this kind of work and show how familiar it must have been. Next come conventional ornaments in the so-called ‘Italian’ manner, consisting in acanthus scrolls, swags of fruit and flowers, with classical motives such as horns of plenty and candelabra, among which are soon introduced ‘putti’ or Cupids, terminal figures, etc. As the fifteenth century advanced there was developed the curious _penchant_, noticed ante, p. 264, for introducing perspective delineations of buildings and articles of furniture into the tarsia designs. Vasari in his Life of Filippo Brunelleschi _Opere_, ed. Milanesi, II, 333 (see also the text ante, p. 262), distinctly intimates that this was due to the influence of this artist, whose enthusiasm for perspective studies is well known. The only existing works in wood inlay which might claim to be designed or inspired by Brunelleschi are those in the old sacristy of S. Lorenzo at Florence, but these do not display perspectives, and the subjects comprise only ‘putti’ with candelabra, rosettes, and other simple ornaments. The influence of Brunelleschi on the advancement of the study of perspective was however so great, that Vasari’s view of his general responsibility for the perspectives is credible.

With the perspective designs of the latter part of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, was developed the elaborate delineation of objects of still-life, as well as more ambitious work in the representation of the human figure, alone or in groups. These inlays were abundantly displayed in wall panelling and on the doors of presses, and more especially on the backs and frames of choir stalls in the churches. It is characteristic of Italian decoration as opposed to that prevailing at an earlier date north of the Alps, to find choir stalls, which in northern churches are made the occasion of the most splendid display of wood carving in the boldest architectural and plastic styles which the world has to show, decorated in Italy for the most part in a pictorial style with flat inlays.

The number of extant examples, both in the case of presses and of choir stalls, is so great that no enumeration is possible, and the reader is referred for a critical account of the chief monuments of the art to the small book by Dr Scherer, _Technik und Geschichte der Intarsia_, Leipzig, 1891. The artists who fostered the work were also very numerous, and represent many centres in the northern parts of Italy. We learn for instance that in Florence alone in the year 1478 there were no fewer than 84 _botteghe_ where tarsia work was in full practice. The names actually mentioned by Vasari will suffice to represent the chief phases of the craft. If Brunelleschi may have started the idea of perspective designs, these were carried out to great perfection by Fra Giovanni da Verona, whose master-works, the stalls and presses in S. Maria in Organo at Verona, dating from about 1500 onwards, are among the most famous examples of the kind. Here are perspectives of buildings and furniture, objects of still-life, and the like, with geometrical patterns in the framings and on the dado. In figure work Benedetto da Majano, whom Vasari mentions, and more especially his brother Giuliano da Majano, were masters of the very first rank, and the examples left by the latter on the presses of the sacristy of the Duomo at Florence, and on the door leading to the Sala d’ Udienza in the Palazzo Vecchio, are masterpieces of technique and style. At a later date near the middle of the century, the artist mentioned by Vasari towards the end of his

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