Greek and Roman art methods, medieval techniques, tempera painting, van Eyck's revolutionary use of oil paints, Flemish methods of preparing colors, methods of 18th-century British artists, technical secrets of Italian schools, including such masters as Leonardo, Raphael, Correggio, Andrea del Sarto, and more.
Eastlake Knowing beforehand that some chapters contains erroneous information about ancient great masters' techniques, is a good book to read on holidays
A must for any Atelier Student I am working on my MFA in art. While I am not a strict conservative in the tradition of painting, I am very serious about my training in the techniques of the old masters. Many new books have been published that claim to give you the substance needed, but most of these books show you what you can do, not how you can do it. We are in a period of time in art education where the late modernist and early postmodernist curriculum is strongly emphasized. It is a rare opportunity to find a teacher that has the information this book contains. A true painter ought to know where his materials come from and how they are made. This book gives direct translations from the old masters on how to create pigments and vehicles for oil painting. Like the fact that masters would save the bones from dinner and them char them to create lamp black. This book also gives techniques for purifying raw linseed oil. Little facts like these have been a mystery to me for so long because few teachers know this information.
This is actually a two volume book compiled into one. The first volume deals primarily with recipes of the masters and correlating schools of their time. The second volume deals with techniques such as sfumato(Da Vinci) chiaroscuro(Caravaggio) and other important concepts in painting.
If you learn more about the materials you work with, you will be a better artist, no matter what type of art you do. I recommend this book to the traditionalist, modernist, and postmodernist.
Why me? It took me several days to bull through the first 50 pages. I found out that must cultures used some sort of "drying oil" -- linseed or other for oil painting. This discovery astounded me so much, that Ii have been unable to continue reading. Perhaps the people who gave it a high rating could tell me something to encourage further reading.
By the way this system won't let me give this book a zero star rating.
Unless you're an art scholar, don't bother. Out of the thousands of dollars I've spent on art books over the years to understand and improve my knowledge as a realist artist, this has to be the only one I've ever bought so far that I found completly useless. If you want to impress another artist, sure, hit them over the head with it. But apart from that I can't really see the point of it being marketed to modern day artists. Written in 1847 with language to match, it just simply describes what most realist artists can usually figure out for themselves by looking at the pictures. And come to much clearer conclusions. Something that your average artist without a generous income and the time to travel round europe during that time period probably couldn't do. Hence the reason I imagine, this book was written.
As a teaching aid for your modern day realist artist, in my opinion forget it. If you want a book this thick and scholastic that will actually help you, get Ralph Mayers 'The Artist's Handbook of Materials & Techniques' instead.
Beware of impressive, studious sounding reviews - I'm sorry I wasted my money on it.
An important source for painters A seminal work - referred to by authorities (Ralph mayer, etc) on painting technique. A must have if you're interested in painting technique throught the centuries.
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