Many of the greatest paintings succeed in part because they use optical effects in their paint layer. This takes advantage of the fact that thinner layers of paint aren’t completely opaque, so allow some light to pass through them. In watercolours, transparent paints are often referred to as transparent watercolour, while those that are opaque are known as gouache or body colour. In oils, different pigments result in degrees of opacity, expressed as their covering power.

This cross-section of the paint layer from Honoré Daumier’s The Strongman (c 1865) demonstrates how many oil paintings consist of a series of layers, with several pigments present through their depth. Generally, the most opaque are applied first, and on top of those come a series of thinner transparent layers or glazes. Together these allow complex combinations of reflection and refraction of light, generating optical effects.

Layered oil painting technique is best seen in paintings that have been abandoned before completion.

The British portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds received a conventional training in traditional and conservative methods with roots dating back to the late 1600s. He painted in layers, starting with dead colouring, the laying in of shadows and lights, then blending in transitions of shading and colour wet-on-wet. Highlights were then brought out, and shadows glazed, to produce a series of thin layers of oil paint, and a smooth, finished paint surface.

Those early stages are shown well in this abandoned portrait of Mrs Robinson from about 1784, where most of the paint layer is sufficiently thin as to allow the texture of the canvas to show through. When used with ‘lean’ paint, this dried quickly and complies with the longstanding edict of applying ‘fat’ over ‘lean’, so that the lowest layers dry first.

Richard Parkes Bonington’s unfinished Venice: The Piazza San Marco (1827-28) shows signs that it might have been among his best. Its buildings have a golden glow from the setting sun, but those colours would undoubtedly have been enhanced by rich glazes had he lived long enough to complete it.

Occasionally the paint layer develops problems that demonstrate the effects of glazes.

In Abraham Bloemaert’s The Adoration of the Magi from 1624, the cloak of the Virgin Mary appears to use two different blues, with its lower passages painted in the duller hue of indigo, which has faded. The dullest areas are those that had the thinnest ultramarine glazes applied, much of which have now abraded away during subsequent cleaning of the painting. The unprotected indigo has therefore suffered sufficient exposure to fade, as well as losing those rich glazes.

JMW Turner’s Approach to Venice (1844) was painted with very thin transparent glazes over thick white impasto, creating a distinctive flickering effect in its highlights.

Despite the artist’s efforts to get the white impasto to dry more quickly, the glazes dried first, and cracked as they became stressed over the white that was still wet. This hasn’t been helped by the later conservation process of lining, which places an additional layer on the back of the canvas to help the support do its job.

Although a wide range of pigments have been used successfully in glazes, some were developed specifically for the purpose. From the fifteenth century onwards, verdigris pigment was mixed with natural resins for use in glazes. This produces a different pigment from regular verdigris, as the copper combines with the resin acids to form what is known as copper resinate.

A popular technique among many masters to produce an intense green was to paint an underlayer using verdigris, over which several glazing layers of copper resinate were then applied. Although generally reliable and stable, verdigris and copper resinates have a tendency to turn brown on the surface. Thankfully this affects relatively few paintings.

Tintoretto used copper resinate glazes in several of his paintings, most notably the rich, varied, and often lush vegetation in his Saint George and the Dragon from about 1555.

Studies at the National Gallery, London, have found copper resinate in three of the four paintings in Paolo Veronese’s series The Allegory of Love. In the third of these, Respect (c 1575), the pigment was found in the man’s intense green cloak, and the duller gold-brown brocade patterning on the wall behind his hand (detail below). The surface of that wall has superficial brown discoloration of the paint layer.

One of the last major uses of copper resinate is in Arnold Böcklin’s Triton and Nereid from 1874. This is reported as being painted in tempera, but copper resinate glaze appears to have been used to develop the intense green patterns on the sea monster in the foreground. This is consistent with Böcklin adhering to traditional techniques despite working in the late nineteenth century.

During that century, painting slowly in multiple layers with glazes progressively fell from favour. By the end, many oil painters had adopted techniques in which much or all of a painting was made at once, known as direct, alla prima or au premier coup.

Dante and Virgil move on from their encounter with Count Ugolino towards a great contraption that looks like a windmill from the distance. As they grow closer, they pass by shades of the dead frozen and stacked up.

Virgil then shows Dante the ruler of Hell, a huge giant frozen up to his chest. He has three faces: one looking forward is bright red, that on the right a dirty yellow, and on the left black. Behind each face is a pair of vane-like wings fanning the ice-cold wind blowing across Lake Cocytus.

His six eyes are weeping, and each mouth is chewing one of the souls from that pit of Hell. Virgil points out that one of them, his legs protruding from Lucifer’s lips, is Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus Christ for thirty pieces of silver. The other two are Brutus and Cassius being punished for their assassination of Julius Caesar.

Virgil tells Dante that he has now seen the whole of Hell, and it’s time for them to leave. They make their way up some steps through a fissure in the rock.

Where Dante expects to see the body of Lucifer again, he sees just his legs.

Virgil tells him they must move on quickly, now the sun is rising. They walk through a cavern, along a path long and arduous. Eventually they emerge below the stars. With that, Dante’s account of his visit to Hell is complete.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still being used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted too. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, which were engraved by William Blake.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.

Filippo Napoletano (1589–1629), whose real name was Filippo Teodoro di Liagno, was an Italian painter who worked in Naples, Florence and Rome, mainly painting dramatic landscapes. He was a court painter to the Medicis from around 1617, who also painted a nocturne of the burning of Troy.

Wilhelm Trübner (1851–1917) was a successful realist painter who was born in Heidelberg and worked almost entirely in Germany. In 1872, with Hans Thoma and others he formed a circle who admired the work of Wilhelm Leibl (1844-1900). His peak is claimed to have occurred in the mid-1870s, and in 1901 he joined the Berlin Secession. During his later years he was a professor in Karlsruhe.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

After meeting some political traitors, Dante and Virgil have come across Count Ugolino, who is gnawing the back of the head of Archbishop Ruggieri as a dog chews a bone. Their story is one of the most famous and horrific in the whole of the Divine Comedy.

Ugolino raises his mouth from the cleric’s head and wipes his lips on his victim’s hair. He then introduces himself and the Archbishop. He explains how he, a leading politician at the time, was imprisoned with his young sons and left to starve to death. In his hunger he tried gnawing his own hands, but his sons suggested that their father should eat them instead.

This glue tempera painting by William Blake is one of the few that isn’t taken from his last works illustrating the Divine Comedy, but is a prior work. Unfortunately, its equivalent in Blake’s last series got no further than a pencil sketch before the artist’s death.

Ugolino stopped gnawing his own flesh, and sat in silence day after day, watching his sons die in front of him. By the time the last was dead, the Count himself had gone blind. Once confident there was no life left in their bodies, his hunger overcame his grief.

In history, Ugolino was born into a Ghibelline family in the city of Pisa. He soon changed allegiance to the Guelphs, whom he helped in their quest for power in Pisa. When that was unsuccessful, the Count was imprisoned and exiled, but later led Pisan naval forces against its rival Genoa, for which he was made Pisa’s leader.

In an act of political expediency, Ugolino then handed over Pisan castles to Lucca and Florence, following which he conspired with Ghibellines including Archbishop Ruggieri. This backfired on him, and the Archibishop had him imprisoned with his two sons, two grandsons, and another young man. After eight months there, the door was locked and nailed shut, and its key thrown into the river. Ugolino and the five young men died fairly quickly of starvation.

As far as I’m aware, this painting of Count Ugolino and his Children in the Dungeon is the only work by Joshua Reynolds taken from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1773, nearly five hundred years after the death of the Count, I’m not aware that Reynolds had access to any contemporary images of his subject.

It’s therefore revealing that this slightly later copy was one of many images of the faces of the famous and infamous on which Lavater based his textbook of physiognomy, which in turn was popular among painters, making it a self-fulfilling fantasy.

Dante and Virgil move on from Ugolino’s tragedy to meet more traitors frozen into Lake Cocytus in Hell, as they make their way towards the bottom of its pit, and Lucifer himself.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Pierino da Vinci (1530–1553) was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, the son of Leonardo da Vinci’s younger brother. He died of malaria, which was still endemic in much of Europe at that time, at the age of only 23, leaving few examples of his work.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still being used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.

Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801) was a Swiss poet and philosopher who was a friend of the painter Henry Fuseli. Between 1775-78, he published an early textbook on physiognomy, in which he related physical appearance, particularly of the face, to specific character traits of individuals. He did this using many illustrations of famous and infamous people. This attracted a popular following, including many artists.

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) was the major portrait painter of his day, one of the co-founders and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He enjoyed royal patronage, and moved in the highest of artistic circles. However, his work and teaching were lambasted by William Blake, and some of his paintings have suffered serious problems in their paint layer as a result of his experimentation with pigments and technique.

Jan van der Straet, also commonly known by his Italianised name of Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605), was a painter who started his career in Bruges and Antwerp in Belgium, but moved to Florence in 1550, where he worked for the remainder of his life. Mannerist in style, he worked with printmakers in Antwerp to produce collections of prints, including an extensive set for The Divine Comedy.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.