Re: Maroger's Medium, and words, and ethos...

In Reply to: Re: Maroger's Medium, and words, and ethos... posted by Ed on 04/21/00 at 10:40 AM:

Ed,
chemical reactions were well known to people in antiquity. By the time we get to what most people consider the Old Masters (Renaissance to Baroque period) there had been several thousand years of even older masters preceding them.

Most were illiterate (which just means that they could not read) and thus did not try to preordain every stroke by reading volumes before attacking the canvas. That method certainly gave them much more time at the easel than would someone bent on researching the entire chemistry of paint before ever touching brush to canvas. With that experience came a keen observational sense -- again, something we cannot get by reading a book.

Most of those people observed how a raw egg yolk dried on a plate. They observed that it dies hard when exposed to sunlight. Did they know that it was the actinic light that cause the protein molecules to bend and form a stronger union? Of course not. But they did know that sunlight made egg youlk almost waterproof. They also knew that various oils would dry upon exposure to air. Over the years they learned that heating oil causes it to dry faster. Doubtless they experimented with heating it to different temperatures, adding everything they could lay hands on to see if it would do something cool. Doubtless, most of those experiments were failures, but some worked out (modern research chemists do almost the same thing...make a compound and then test it to see what it does).

Although most of the world's patents were filed in the past fifty years, that does not mean that most of the world's basic inventions were not done previous to that. The human race is pretty amazing and we've been smart and inquisitive for a long, long time. A few thousand years of people who are _ALMOST_ as bright as Socrates was bound to produce a solid body of knowledge.

By Rubens' time, there was a very impressive body of knowledge concerning chemistry, varnish making and new methods of synthesizing pigments. We have yet to improve upon the method they invented to create vermilion and white lead have yet to be improved upon. If that's the case, it is entirely possible that those same keen minds were capable of producing oil mediums that approached a zenith too.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
: I understand the basic's behind chemistry, but I'm interested in knowing how the old masters knew their painting's would survive so long

: Experience can be an answer, what person thought of using oil as a carrier, who originated the idea if gesso and rabbit skin glue did they know something about the chemistry.
 
A. A. Art. This Site designed and maintained by Alexei Antonov
Translation from Russian Copyright (c) 1999 Vladimir Pavlov.
Copyright (c) 1999 Alexei Antonov. All rights reserved.