If you’ve left plates coated with egg for a while, you’ll know how difficult its residue can be to remove. No one knows when people first took advantage of this in paints, but earliest surviving examples date from late classical times. By the Renaissance, egg yolk was popular as a binder in artists’ paints, and the technique of egg tempera was used to create many of the masterpieces of the day.

Pure egg tempera technique uses the proteins, fats and other constituents of the yolk of fresh hens’ eggs as its binder; being water-based, water is its diluent. Applied thinly to an absorbent ground such as powdered chalk in a gesso, this quickly sets to form a hard if not brittle paint layer which, unlike glue tempera, can’t readily be removed by water.

Because egg tempera forms such a hard paint layer but is applied thinly, it’s prone to cracking unless the support is rigid and doesn’t change dimensions over time. Early egg tempera paintings were almost exclusively made on wood, but more recently stretched canvas has been used instead. That can lead to cracks and eventual mechanical failure of the paint layer. Egg tempera on wood panel was the favoured combination for easel paintings during the early Renaissance, particularly in Italy.

The finest paintings in egg tempera use only fresh eggs; as eggs age, particularly when they’re not refrigerated, separating the yolk becomes more difficult, and the resulting paint layer doesn’t appear as strong.

Since the nineteenth century, some paint manufacturers such as Sennelier have offered tubed paints with egg as their main binder, but with the addition of some drying oil to form an egg-oil emulsion. These have some of the properties of pure egg tempera, but are more versatile in their handling, and can be used like gouache and even, to a degree, like oil paints. These appear to have been derived from recipes recorded during the Renaissance.

Earliest European examples of egg tempera, such as Margarito d’Arezzo’s The Virgin and Child Enthroned, with Scenes of the Nativity and the Lives of the Saints from the middle of the thirteenth century, often incorporate extensive gilding and today might appear ‘primitive’.

Even the earliest paintings in egg tempera can be remarkably well preserved, such as Duccio’s Healing of the Man born Blind from the early fourteenth century. Although it only forms a thin paint layer, egg yolk is sufficient to preserve high levels of chroma in the pigments.

As the modelling of flesh and clothing became more realistic, egg tempera proved more than sufficient for the task.

One of the finest early works painted entirely in egg tempera is the anonymous Wilton Diptych in London’s National Gallery. Thought to have been made in France at the end of the fourteenth century, its exquisite detail would have been painted in multiple thin layers using fine brushes, much like miniatures painted on vellum.

But it was in Italy that painting in egg tempera reached its apogee, with masters like Masaccio, in his Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece from about 1428-29 (above) and Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ (below) of a decade later.

During the fifteenth century, egg tempera was progressively replaced by oils in Italy, as it had been earlier in the Northern Renaissance.

Uccello’s large panel of the Battle of San Romano incorporated some drying oils, including walnut and linseed, although it was still fundamentally painted in egg tempera.

By the end of the fifteenth century, many studios had changed to oils. Among the last large egg tempera paintings are Botticelli’s Primavera (above) and The Birth of Venus (below), from the 1480s. The craft labour involved in producing these large works must have been enormous. Although Primavera was painted on a panel, Venus is on canvas, making it more manageable given its size of nearly 2 x 3 metres (79 x 118 inches).

In the closing years of the fifteenth century, Michelangelo kept to the hallowed tradition of egg tempera on wood in this unfinished painting of the Virgin and Child known now as The Manchester Madonna. This shows how he painstakingly completed each of the figures before moving onto the next, and the characteristic green earth ground.

By this time, the only common use for egg tempera was in the underpainting before applying oils on top. This remains a controversial practice: performed on top of gesso ground it can be successful, but increasingly studios transferred to oils. Egg tempera didn’t completely disappear, though. With so many fine examples of how good its paintings both look and age, there were always some artists who have chosen it over oils.

Some nineteenth century movements that aimed to return to the more wonderful art of the past experimented again with egg tempera. In the late 1870s, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope started to use the medium, and made one of his finest works, Love and the Maiden (1877), using it.

A later exponent who was rigorous in his technique was Adrian Stokes, who used it to great effect in this landscape of Autumn in the Mountains in 1903.

But for my taste, the greatest painter in egg tempera since the Renaissance has to be one of the major artists of the twentieth century: Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009). As his works remain in copyright, I recommend that you browse his official site, where you can see just how effective egg tempera can be in the hands of a great master. It may not be as popular as in the past, but egg tempera still has a great deal to offer.

Earlier in this series, I showed an example of the origin of all modern paintings in the decorated caves of pre-history. As shelters became buildings, our ancestors continued to paint their walls, using a technique now known as secco wall or mural painting, where wet paint is applied to dry stone or plaster.

Secco has been widely used outside Europe, and can still be seen in some very old European wall paintings, such as those in Braunschweig Cathedral, including Christ Pantocrator, thought to date from the early thirteenth century. Long before that was created, though, wall painting advanced to improve adhesion between its paint layer and ground. In secco technique, only thin layers of pigment can be used, resulting in weak colours, little detail, and the need for periodic re-painting as pigment is gradually lost over time.

Artists experimented with different binders and secco techniques. Although dry plaster is more absorbent and a better ground than bare stone, success has been limited, and failure a constant danger. At some time before about 1700 BCE, one of the Mediterranean cultures discovered that it was possible to apply paint onto a layer of wet plaster, and the technique of fresco (strictly, buon fresco) was born.

The Romans loved frescos that made their rooms look as if they were in a spacious outdoors, like this from the House of the Golden Bracelet in Pompeii.

In fresco, the support remains the wall or ceiling of the building, but the ground is absorbent wet plaster applied to that surface. Pigment is diluted in water and applied directly to the ground while the latter is still wet; this allows the paint to be absorbed into the ground, providing good and durable bonding of the pigment. Plaster is made using lime, derived from crushed limestone, and sets by reaction with carbon dioxide in the air to form calcium carbonate (from which both chalk and limestone are composed) and water, which evaporates during drying.

Techniques became even more refined, with the use of additional layers of plaster prepared in specific ways, to which red pigment sinopia might be added, allowing the artist to draw construction and other lines to assist in final painting. Because these frescos are on a grand scale, transferring the design of a painting from final sketch to the wall or ceiling is also a challenge.

The central problem for the painter is that, to be successful, fresco has to be painted onto the plaster when it is still wet. That means only a limited area can be plastered and painted each day, known as giornate (singular giornata), a day’s work. For all but the smallest of ground-level fresco paintings, work has to be undertaken at height, from a scaffold, posing the very real risk that the artist would fall, or the scaffolding fail. Many fresco painters have fallen at work, some suffering serious injuries or death as a result.

Despite all these practical difficulties, some of the most important European works of art are frescos painted during the Renaissance in places of worship with their high walls and ceilings.

Masaccio’s magnificent fresco of The Holy Trinity in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, was painted in 1426-28. At the outset he would have made a preliminary plan including his giornate starting at the top and working downwards. Once ready to start the painting, a team of carpenters will have erected wooden scaffolding to give the artist and his assistants access to the whole of that section of the wall, to the full height of over six metres (21 feet). The first stage would then have been completed by assistants, who laid a rough under-layer of plaster known as the arriccio over the whole wall, and left it to dry for several days. This layer often contains abrasive sand particles to provide a key for the final layer of plaster.

Once that had dried completely, Masaccio and his assistants transferred the drawings onto the surface of the arriccio. This may have been performed by scaling up from the squared drawing and painting with sinopia, or full-size drawings may have been pricked to make holes in the paper and a bag of soot banged against the sheet held against the wall, a technique known as pouncing. Masaccio is known to have used both techniques, and may well have used each in different sections of this work.

On each day of painting, assistants would prepare the colours by mixing pigments in water. The day’s supply of plaster, the intonaco, is then prepared by mixing water with lime. That day’s giornata is covered with a thin layer of intonaco, and about an hour later Masaccio started painting into it. He then had about eight hours before it dried and he could apply no more fresh paint. Like many of the best fresco painters, Masaccio extended his painting time by using paint mixed with milk or casein and a little lime, effectively a lime-based casein medium, which could be laid onto dry intonaco.

The geometric requirements of this painting also merited special measures. When the intonaco was first applied, it was marked to indicate key construction lines, such as those in the barrel-vaulted ceiling, and down the pillars at the side. The remains of these incised lines are still visible when the fresco is viewed in raking light. In this case, there is evidence that Masaccio used lengths of string attached to a nail sunk at the vanishing point of the linear projection, below the base of the cross.

Although we think of frescos as being fixed, this one has now been moved twice within the same church, which hasn’t helped its appearance. During conservation work and movement of Masaccio’s painting in the 1950s, the opportunity was taken to study its construction. Leonetto Tintori drew up a plan of all the identified construction lines and edges of giornate; I have sketched in the latter from a reproduction of a drawing made at that time, which has since been destroyed.

It’s estimated the whole painting would have required some 24 giornate, although because of the long history of damage and attempts at its restoration, that number remains flexible. Assuming that Masaccio painted six days a week, that would have required a minimum of four weeks working for at least ten hours each day. Fresco painting doesn’t permit easy alterations either: if any repainting was required and couldn’t be accomplished using dry technique, that day’s giornata would have to be removed, replaced and repainted.

Giornate can sometimes become obvious over time, as shown in Giotto’s fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy.

Perhaps the most famous fresco is Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement (1536-41) in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican. It covers an area of 13.7 by 12 metres (539 by 472 inches), and took over four years to complete.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fresco became relatively neglected.

Some new frescos were commissioned for places of worship and other public buildings, and in the early nineteenth century Johann Friedrich Overbeck painted a series telling the story of Torquato Tasso’s epic Jerusalem Delivered, in the Casa Massimo in Rome. There are similar series showing Dante’s Divine Comedy and other long narratives, which are particularly suited to the medium.

In 1845, the Scottish artist William Dyce was invited to paint frescos for the Royal Family, for which he travelled to Italy to learn technique. On his return in 1847, he painted this curious composition in Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s new and luxurious holiday palace of Osborne House, at East Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. Neptune Resigning to Britannia the Empire of the Sea (1847) is an impressive fresco, and remains in pristine condition at the top of the main staircase in the house.

Frescos have continued in religious painting, with artists such as Sergei Fyodorov painting them in churches and cathedrals, and for the occasional trompe l’oeil. John Dixon Batten’s The Creation of Pandora was painted anachronistically in egg tempera on a fresco ground by 1913. Batten was one of the late adherents of the Pre-Raphaelite movement; this painting was deemed unfashionable in 1949, and was put into storage and quietly forgotten until its rediscovery in 1990.

New frescos are still painted in some public buildings too. This work by Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela is one of a series he painted in the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki in 1928, but most other wall paintings of the twentieth century, such as those of John Singer Sargent in public buildings in Boston, have been painted in oils on canvas rather than buon fresco.

Frescos aren’t the only way of making very large and monumental paintings for places like churches, though. The walls of Venetian buildings are particularly unsuitable for secco or fresco, because they remain so damp all year round. Hence the painters of Venice were innovators in constructing very large canvases, and you will find few frescos there as a result.

One of the golden rules in narrative painting is to tell stories that the viewer is already familiar with, because of the limitations imposed by still images. By the middle of the nineteenth century, though, artists were breaking that rule in what became a new sub-genre of the ‘problem picture’, with open-ended narrative encouraging the viewer to construct their own stories. William Blake was a precursor to that in some of his paintings, and this weekend I look at two examples that try to tell stories we’re unfamiliar with.

At first sight, Blake’s painted etching The Ancient of Days from about 1821 might represent the Christian God seen as master craftsman, forming the world out of the darkness below heaven. That would be an innovative but hardly revolutionary interpretation of the opening of the book of Genesis.

That wasn’t Blake’s intention, though. This represents Urizen, one of many figures from his own mythology, and documented only in the artist’s writings. There, Urizen symbolises reason, his name most probably a semi-conscious pun on your reason. This painting shows Urizen the architect, creating the world using his compasses. He goes on to have the role of the jealous and vengeful god of the Old Testament, but his desire for dominion brings about his downfall into a state of Satan.

Representations of God as architect aren’t common, but Blake’s would be by no means unique.

This frontispiece to a Bible Moralisée from around 1220-30 shows the Christian God as architect, using his compasses during the creation of the world. The compasses continue in various modern symbols, including those that feature in freemasonry, and in its references to the Supreme Being as the Great Architect of the Universe.

Urizen typically appears with long and streaming white hair and beard, as in Blake’s plates throughout his First Book of Urizen from 1796.

But Urizen isn’t the only figure from Blake’s mythology who has long white hair and beard: above is Elohim Creating Adam from 1795, for example.

In Blake’s God Judging Adam also from about 1795, both figures sport long, flowing white hair and beards, which appear to be markers not so much of their ages or identities, but of the ancient nature of events.

Long white hair and beards are of course a long-established tradition in visual art: here is a contemporary example of Tiresias, the blind prophet of Apollo at Thebes, in Henry Fuseli’s Tiresias Appears to Ulysses During the Sacrifice (1780-85). Fuseli was Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy, and a great influence on Blake.

Characteristic of the figure of Urizen in The Ancient of Days is the unusual way in which the figure’s hair and beard stream as if in a strong wind, the figure’s nakedness, and its posture.

This can be traced most immediately to a major work by another contemporary painter who was highly influential on Blake: James Barry’s King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia (1786–8). Barry was also Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy, and the similarities between King Lear’s white hair and beard here, and those of Blake’s Urizen in The Ancient of Days, are striking.

Blunt found another potential source in Pellegrino Tibaldi’s figure of Neptune (1549-51) in his fresco showing the story of Ulysses in the Palazzo Poggi. Although now relatively obscure, Blake saw fresco as being ‘true’ art, and was long an enthusiast of frescos, even if he saw few. A contemporary popular book of prints of frescos included an engraving of Tibaldi’s Neptune, so this image would have been accessible to both Blake and Barry.

It’s likely that Tibaldi’s Neptune was itself a reference to Michelangelo’s earlier frescos in the Sistine Chapel: the detail above showing God creating the sun and moon, and even more important that below showing the creation of Adam (c 1511).

Blake knew both of these sections of the Sistine Chapel frescos well, having engraved them previously. They also link to Blake’s own Elohim Creating Adam above.

Blake’s Urizen the architect, seen creating the world using his compasses, is distinct from both God and Elohim in his nakedness. In Blake’s written narrative, the distinction between Urizen and Elohim becomes more blurred, when the former goes on to have the role of the jealous and vengeful god of the Old Testament, until his desire for dominion brings about his downfall.

It may be tempting to assume that, just because Blake’s paintings appear so original and different, they originate entirely from his own mind. However, Blake was just as likely to borrow from and refer to other visual art as any other master.

References

Blunt, A (1959) The Art of William Blake, Oxford UP.
Butlin, M (1981) The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 02550 7.
Damon, S Foster (2013) A Blake Dictionary, the Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, updated edn., Dartmouth College Press. ISBN 978 1 61168 443 8.
Vaughan, William (1999) William Blake, British Artists, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 190 1.