20th Century Painting Research Articles

Physical and Chemical Characterisation of the Pigments of a 17th-Century Mural Painting in the Spanish Caribbean.

The arrival of Spaniards in the Caribbean islands introduced to the region the practice of applying pigments onto buildings. The pigments that remain on these buildings may provide data on their historical evolution and essential information for tackling restoration tasks. In this study, a 17th-century mural painting located in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo on the Hispaniola island of the Caribbean is characterised via UV–VIS–NIR, Raman and FTIR spectroscopy, XRD and SEM/EDX. The pigments are found in the older Chapel of Our Lady of Candelaria, currently Chapel of Our Lady of Mercy. The chapel was built in the 17th century by black slave brotherhood and extended by Spaniards. During a recent restoration process of the chapel, remains of mural painting appeared, which were covered by several layers of lime. Five colours were identified: ochre, green, red, blue and white. Moreover, it was determined that this mural painting was made before the end of the 18th century, because many of the materials used were no longer used after the industrialisation of painting. However, since both rutile and anatase appear as a white pigment, a restoration may have been carried out in the 20th century, and it has been painted white.

FROM 2D (TO 3D) TO 2.5D – NOT ALL GRIDDED DIGITAL SURFACES ARE CREATED EQUALLY

Abstract. The surface of most heritage objects holds important clues about their creation. To answer specific research questions about a 16th-century mural painting located in the Bischofstor of Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral, the three-dimensional (3D) geometry of the entire painted surface was digitised in minuscule detail using thousands of overlapping photographs. Although this article provides image acquisition and processing specifics, it aims to assess which image-based modelling workflow can achieve the most detailed, noise-free, two-and-a-half dimensional (2.5D) raster surface of this mural painting. Other than their full 3D counterparts and in contrast to the focus of most academic research, 2.5D raster surfaces are ideally suited for visualising and analysing sizeable, detailed surfaces. They are, therefore, still the preferred surface encoding of many heritage projects that want to leverage digital surface approximations to further heritage insights (and not just use them as mere eyecatchers). In the end, only a combination of different 2.5D rasters was able to accurately represent the variable surface of this mural painting with the right amount of spatial detail.

Canvas-related microcracks in Danish 19th-century paintings

Canvas-related microcracks in Danish 19th-century paintings

„Strach im większy, tym bardziej wiąże się z podziwem”. O przedstawieniach katastrof i kataklizmów w malarstwie XVIII i XIX wieku w kontekście estetyki wzniosłości i spektaklu.

The article develops the concept of disaster and calamity in the 18th and 19th century painting (since the beginning of modernism). The motif, which was particularly popular on the threshold of modernity, was depicted then without a religious or allegoric context and more often than not with reference to actual events that occurred in that period such as a shipwreck or fire. It is said that the key element characteristic for the presentation of disasters within painting was the discourse on the sublime which was related to fascination with the natural elements. The discourse was dominated by the British philosophy and aesthetics of the XVIII century and the reflection expressed by Immanuel Kant in his book Critique of Pure Reason. The aesthetics of spectacle, which was present in other areas of the culture those days, was essential for the 18th and 19th painting as it attached the pageantry and monumentality and led to thecommercial success. In the middle of the 19th century, when painting revealed the fascination with technology and industrial revolution, the concept of the sublime was transformed as well. In a way, the images of the industrial expansion which delighted the contemporary viewer might be interpreted today as a premonition of the disaster which is yet to come.

Port City Architecture

This article addresses the role and the importance of the 19th-century narratives and depictions of port cities in contemporary architectural design with a specific focus on paintings. In the last decades, cities the world undertook a large number of urban regeneration projects along waterfronts. In this way, vacant sites on waterfront areas became an opportunity to apply contemporary architectural design; however, many of those projects resulted in generic buildings failing to establish relationships with their landscape, environs, and the history of port cities. High-rise buildings, for instance, began to dominate waterfronts in many of the port cities (e.g., in London, Liverpool, Rotterdam, Baltimore). The land was simply used as a “site” by developers, and the contemporary architectural design failed to address the specificity of the architecture and caved in to the demands which had little to do with the possibilities of place. This article showcases a library and concert hall project realised in Bodo, Norway, to provide insight into an alternative model, where the architecture is situated specifically in response to the port condition and acts as a mediator between port, city and landscape. An interview with the architect Daniel Rosbottom, founder of the architecture firm DRDH which designed the project, provided insight into the design process. As Rosbottom elaborated broadly, a 19th-century painting of church San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice h, by the English painter J.M.W Turner was used as an inspiration for the design process. The embedded knowledge in the painting informed the project at various levels and turned a site into a place on the waterfront of Bodo. The design process analysis reveals similarities and significance of paired relations between artworks and architectural design and hints that the remedy of the contemporary architectures in port cities may lie in port cities’ own (immaterial) resources.

Рецепция французской живописи XVII–XVIII веков в «Искусственной принцессе» Рональда Фирбенка

Рецепция французской живописи XVII–XVIII веков в «Искусственной принцессе» Рональда Фирбенка

Vers l’autonomisation des nuages : la voie picturale

The scientific age of clouds assumed the recognition of the existence of atmospheric electricity. It was nevertheless necessary to wait for Luke Howard in order for clouds to be not only observed but also named and classified (1802). What was the role played by painting in their scientific invention? Throughout the centuries very diverse points of view appeared concerning these paradoxical objects -the most dreamlike of all. Taken as cushions allowings for the distribution of space, as vehicles for pagan gods or of the unique God, as more or less transparent or opaque veils, clouds belong to the imaginary as well as to the phusis. However, Ruisdael already conceived the cloud as a personage. One can easily take his Buisson (Bush) (maladroitly titled) for a 19th century painting, individualizing the most labile appearance and giving it consistency even before any appellation

If painters give you lemons, squeeze the knowledge out of them. A study on the visual perception of the translucent and juicy appearance of citrus fruits in paintings.

Citrus fruits are characterized by a juicy and translucent interior, important properties that drive material recognition and food acceptance. Yet, a thorough understanding of their visual perception is still missing. Using citrus fruits depicted in 17th-century paintings as stimuli, we ran three rating experiments. In Experiment 1, participants rated the perceived similarity in translucency or juiciness of the fruits. In Experiment 2, different groups of participants rated one image feature from a list obtained in a preliminary experiment. In Experiment 3, translucency and juiciness were rated. We constructed two-dimensional perceptual spaces for both material properties and fitted the ratings of the image features into the spaces to interpret them. “Highlights,” “peeled side,” “bumpiness,” and “color saturation” fit the juiciness space best and were high for the highly juicy stimuli. “Peeled side,” “intensity of light gradient,” “highlights,” and “color saturation” were the most salient features of the translucency space, being high for the highly translucent stimuli. The same image features were also indicated in a 17th-century painting manual for material depiction (Beurs, 1692; Beurs, in press). Altogether, we disclosed the expertise of painters with regard to material perception by identifying the image features that trigger a visual impression of juiciness and translucency in citrus fruits.

ESTE TRIUNFO Y CIEN MÁS SERÁN INÚTILES SI NO DOMINAMOS EL MAR. AGUA Y PINTURA EN CHILE EN EL SIGLO XIX. COMPOSICIÓN, LUZ Y COLOR SEGÚN A. SMITH, C. WOOD Y T. SOMERSCALES

The present article has the purpose to offer an analysis of the evolution of chilean painting during the 19th century, investigated from the interpretation of the water in the pictorial production of three of the most representative artists in the field of landscape, sea and naval glory painting. In particular, we will refere to the creations of Antonio Smith, Charles Wood and Thomas Somerscales, whose representations of rivers, lakes and especially Pacific Ocean are a proof of the productive phase that in 19th century painting had in Chile. We will focus on the study of the three keys of composition, light and color in a combination of works kept in precious public and private collections, selected due to the judgment about the relevant technical and esthetic qualities by the actual artistic critics and historiography.

Disclosing glittering and sparkling effects in 20th-century reverse glass paintings: a study of metallic pigments and metal foils by means of in situ XRF and DRIFTS analysis

Abstract This work presents a spectroscopic study of metallic pigments and metal foils used in reverse glass paintings that were created between 1912 and 1954. Metallic pigments induce a notable sparkling effect by means of the lateral incidence of light, whereas metal foils enhance the gloss and create a glittering effect when the painting is viewed in reflected light. Both effects were desired features especially in modern reverse paintings on glass and applied by artists in manifold creative manner. The paper gives an overview on the composition of the metal foils and metal pigments in 14 works as determined in situ by X-ray spectrometry. Metal foils made of tin, brass, aluminium and silver were found in nine paintings. Gold-imitating Cu-Zn pigments in different hues and with various Cu/Zn net intensity ratios were recorded for six paintings. Silvery pigments were identified mainly as Al pigments, but also as Cu-Zn-Ni alloy in one case. Other uncommon metallic pigments were detected in Arlequin vindicatif (c. 1925) by Floris Jespers, who used not only Cu-Zn and Al pigments, but also brownish Cu and Cu-Zn-Sn pigments. Non-invasive diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier-transform spectroscopy (DRIFTS) was used to classify the binding media of the metallic pigments. Drying oil and natural resin probably mixed with oil were the most common binding media. A polysaccharide-based binder was found in the silvery Cu-Zn-Ni pigment of Ohne Titel (1954) by Marianne Uhlenhuth.

Macro X‐ray fluorescence scanning, multi‐ and hyperspectral imaging study of multiple layers of paintings on paneled vault in the church of Le Quillio (France)

During initial conservator's investigation of paneled wooden vault of the church in Le Quillio, 17th century paintings, hidden behind painted canvas nailed on the panels were discovered. A closer look on these paintings and some exposure windows showed the presence of an older paint layer. This layer corresponds to the first vault decoration, dating back all the way at the end of 15th century, existence of which was attested by written sources. However, the conservation state of the original pictorial layer was unknown, so it was not possible to make a decision to uncover it without further information acquired, preferably, noninvasively. Examination of different layers was performed by extracting, processing and cross‐referencing the information from the complementary data obtained from macro X‐ray fluorescence scanning as well as multi‐ and hyperspectral imaging. This allowed to characterize the mineral composition of different layers and to attribute them respectively to the end of 15th century original painting, the 17th century overpaint and to the later 19th century interventions corresponding rather to a large retouching or restoration. Our study also showed the particularities of the mounting of panels, as some parts on the first decoration's paint seem to be partially discontinued between successive panels and may attest to the exchange of panels between different parts of the vault. This pilot study was conducted on an only small part of the large vault (0.4% of the 32 m2). Further, more extensive investigations will be required to better understand this complex object and its complex history.

Perceptual signatures of velvet and satin depicted in 17th century paintings

Perceptual signatures of velvet and satin depicted in 17th century paintings

A juicy orange makes for a tastier juice: The neglected role of visual material perception in packaging design

Food appearance sets intentions and expectations. When designing packaged food much attention is devoted to packaging elements like color and shape, but less to the characteristics of the images used. To our awareness, no study has yet investigated how the appearance of the food shown on the package affects consumers’ preferences. Often, orange juice packages depict an orange. Juiciness being one of the most important parameters to assess oranges’ quality, we hypothesized that an orange with a juicier appearance on the package would improve the overall evaluation of the juice.Using image cues found to trigger juiciness perception of oranges depicted in 17th century paintings, we designed four orange juice packages by manipulating the highlights on the pulp (present vs. absent) and the state of the orange (unpeeled vs. peeled).In an online experiment, 400 participants, each assigned to one condition, rated expected naturalness, healthiness, quality, sweetness and tastiness of the juice, package attractiveness and willingness to buy. Finally, they rated juiciness of the orange for all four images.A one-way ANOVA showed a significant effect of the highlights on juiciness. A MANOVA showed that the presence of highlights, both in isolation and in interaction with the peeled side, also significantly increased expected quality and tastiness of the juice.The present study shows the importance of material perception and food texture appearance in the imagery of food packaging. We suggest that knowledge from vision science on image features and material perception should be integrated into the process of packaging design.

The Changing Perception of the Five Senses

This article examines the changing approach towards the representation of the senses in 17th-century Flemish painting. These changes are related to the cultural politics and courtly culture of the Spanish sovereigns of the Southern Netherlands, the Archdukes Albert and Isabella. The 1617–18 painting-series of the Five Senses by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens as well as the pendant paintings on the subject are analyzed in relation to the iconography of the five senses, and in regard to Flemish genre themes. In this context, the excess of objects, paintings, scientific instruments, animals, and plants in the Five Senses are read as an expansion of the iconography of the senses as well as a reference to the courtly material culture of the Archdukes. Framing the senses as part of a cultural web of artifacts, Brueghel and Rubens refer both to elite lived experience and traditional iconography. The article examines the continuity between the iconography of the senses from 1600 onwards, as developed by Georg Pencz, Frans Floris, and Maerten de Vos, and the representation of the senses in the series. In addition, the article shows how certain elements in the paintings are influenced by genre paintings of the courtly company and collector’s cabinet, by Frans Francken, Lucas van Valckenborch and Louis de Caullery. Through the synthesis of these two traditions the subject of the five senses is reinvented in a courtly context

Material Properties and Image Cues for Convincing Grapes: The Know-How of the 17th-Century Pictorial Recipe by Willem Beurs

Painters mastered replicating the regularities of the visual patterns that we use to infer different materials and their properties, via meticulous observation of the way light reveals the world’s textures. The convincing depiction of bunches of grapes is particularly interesting. A convincing portrayal of grapes requires a balanced combination of different material properties, such as glossiness, translucency and bloom, as we learn from the 17th-century pictorial recipe by Willem Beurs. These material properties, together with three-dimensionality and convincingness, were rated in experiment 1 on 17th-century paintings, and in experiment 2 on optical mixtures of layers derived from a reconstruction of one of the 17th-century paintings, made following Beurs’s recipe. In experiment 3 only convincingness was rated, using again the 17th-century paintings. With a multiple linear regression, we found glossiness, translucency and bloom not to be good predictors of convincingness of the 17th-century paintings, but they were for the reconstruction. Overall, convincingness was judged consistently, showing that people agreed on its meaning. However, the agreement was higher when the material properties indicated by Beurs were also rated (experiment 1) than if not (experiment 3), suggesting that these properties are associated with what makes grapes look convincing. The 17th-century workshop practices showed more variability than standardization of grapes, as different combinations of the material properties could lead to a highly convincing representation. Beurs’s recipe provides a list of all the possible optical interactions of grapes, and the economic yet effective image cues to render them.

The Still Life(s) of Chantal Akerman: Akerman’s Moving Images and Dutch 17th-Century Painting

ABSTRACT Throughout her career, the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman accelerated the erosion of boundaries separating the visual arts that has fuelled our current moment of mixed media. This article, though, takes different approach to Akerman’s work. It argues that her cinema borrows from a historical type of viewing experience just as much as it pioneered new ones. Specifically, I argue that Akerman drew on the painterly language of seventeenth-century Dutch still-lifes through her use of stillness, texture, space, light, and (self-)portraiture that undermines mainstream modes of visual representation as developed by Renaissance art. Relying on contemporary film theory, art history, and Akerman’s own idiosyncratic style and biography, this essay yields a productive, if unexpected, point of comparison between the aesthetic practices of early modern Dutch painting and Akerman’s moving images. Comparing several of Akerman’s pictures to a handful of masterpieces of seventeenth-century Dutch art, this work joins a growing discourse among visual theorists in exploring connections between cinema and painting more broadly.

True frontal alopecia in 17th-century paintings

Paintings often show women with a clearance of the frontal hairline. We previously remarked how this was a form of pseudoalopecia that was voluntarily caused by women who shaved the frontal part of their hair for fashionable and esthetic reasons. In this paper, we emphasize in a second set of paintings showing a true alopecia that was caused by traction of the hair due to a tight hairstyle and was culturally favored in the 17th century.

Detection of potential biodeterioration risks for tempera painting in 16th century exhibits from State Tretyakov Gallery.

In this study, we investigated biodeterioration of materials used in tempera painting by analyzing the structure of the microbiome in ancient tempera paintings exhibited in State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia. Samples were obtained from 16th-century paintings, including a grand Russian Orthodox icon “The Church Militant” (all exhibits were without visible signs of biodeterioration), and from surrounding walls and ceilings (with vast zones of visible microbial growth). A number of microorganisms isolated from visible signs of environmental bio-damage were also detected in tempera paintings kept in temperature- and humidity-controlled conditions unfavorable for the growth of microflora. To determine the biodegrading potential of the microbiome for tempera paintings, we developed a set of mock layers from paintwork materials used in tempera painting of 16th century and their modern analogues and inoculated them with cultures containing filamentous fungi and bacteria. The susceptibility to microbial degradation of individual tempera painting materials was examined by micro-Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, which enabled detection of even invisible signs of biodeterioration. The results indicate that the microorganisms isolated from paintings and surrounding areas in the museum are capable of causing significant damage of various tempera materials, among which varnishes were the most resistant; however, the addition of antiseptic (sodium pentachlorophenolate) can inhibit microbial growth on sturgeon glue.

Predlošci za slike 17. stoljeća u zbirci Pomorskog i povijesnog muzeja Hrvatskog primorja Rijeka

U Pomorskom i povijesnom muzeju Hrvatskog primorja Rijeka 1987. godine formirana je Zbirka starih majstora koja sadrži oko sto trideset slika. Sačinjena je uglavnom od radova što su ih sakupljali članovi uglednih riječkih obitelji tijekom 19. i početkom 20. stoljeća, a manji je dio u zbirku pristigao iz riječkih sakralnih objekata. Riječ je o djelima relativno skromnih umjetničkih dosega, a već se inicijalnim istraživanjem utvrdilo da su neke od slika nastale prema grafičkim predlošcima. Kako sustavno istraživanje predložaka za djela iz Zbirke starih majstora Pomorskog i povijesnog muzeja Hrvatskog primorja Rijeka do sada nije bilo provedeno, iznesen je niz upitnih i problematičnih datacija i atribucija. Kada je riječ o slikama nastalim tijekom 17. stoljeća, utvrđeni su predlošci za prikaze Navještenja, Bogorodice od Ružarija, Svadbe u Kani Galilejskoj, Poklonstva pastira te Bičevanja Krista. Navještenje je inspirirano grafikom Giovannija Jacopa Caraglia (Verona, o. 1505. – Krakov, 1565.) ili nekom njezinom kasnijom derivacijom, dok je riječka Bogorodica od Ružarija nastala kopiranjem otiska grafike Domenica Marije Canutija (Bologna, 1626. – 1684.). Svadba u Kani Galilejskoj napravljena je pak prema Vannijevoj (Firenca/Pisa, 1599. - Firenca, 1660.) grafici iz 1637. godine ili jednoj od njezinih kasnijih derivacija, što su urezane prema famoznoj Veroneseovoj (Verona, 1528. – Venecija, 1588.) slici koja je danas izložena u Louvreu, a Poklonstvo pastira nastalo je prema bakrorezu Jana (I) Sadelera (Bruxelles, 1550. – Venecija, 1600.). Slika Bičevanje Krista nastala je kombinacijom istoimenog grafičkog lista i onog s prikazom Izrugivanja Krista. Obje su ove grafike djelo Jana (I) Sadelera, odnosno njegova kopista.

IMPRESSIONISTIC INTERTEXT IN O. WILDE’S NOVEL «THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY»

The article explores artistic intertext in Oscar Wilde’s novel «The Picture of Dorian Gray», which is determined by the development of impressionism in European art and literature in the late 19th and early 20th century. «The Picture of Dorian Gray» is a transitional novel which combines traditional and contemporary poetic features, determined by active development of modernism in European art. Having first appeared in late 19th-century French painting, impressionism soon established itself firmly in literature, which is exemplified by O. Wilde’s novel «The Picture of Dorian Gray». Artistic intertext of the novel is defined by the author’s interest for J. Ruskin’s and W. Pater’s ideas, the art of Pre-Raphaelites, impressionist painters’ legacy, and the Japanese art of ukiyo-e which influenced European impressionism. Important role in the novel is played the mention of the iconic exhibition for the Impressionists – Grosvenor (London) and the exhibition of George Petty on Sez Street (Paris), in which, according to the characters, it would be appropriate to exhibit a portrait created by Bаsil Hallward. Being greatly interested in impressionist art, O. Wilde used impressionist poetics in his novel, which manifests itself in portraits, descriptions of nature and urban scenery, allusions and reminiscences to various works of art. This manifests a transition to modernism in the realm of the English novel. Impressionistic intertext in «The Picture of Dorian Gray» has expanded the limits of the structure of the novel, placing an emphasis on subjective impressions and feelings over depiction of external events. Such feelings and impressions, according to O. Wilde, should be captured by the new art.