(jazz music)
Dr. Zucker: Drawing or color, which is most important?
Dr. Harris: This was a burning question for artists
and art critics in the 16th century.
Dr. Zucker: And helped to divine the styles
of entire city states.
Dr. Harris: We're here in the Academia in Venice
looking at Bellini's Madonna and Child
with St. John the Baptist and Saint.
Looking at this painting, I would say
Bellini would have said that color was more important.
The reds and the blues and the greens just glow.
Dr. Zucker: They're spectacular and that's of course
because Bellini is using a new technique
which had been perfected in the north,
known as glazing.
Dr. Harris: That's right.
Taking their cue from the artists
of the northern Renaissance, artists like Jan Van Eyck,
and the way that they painted was to apply oil paint
on a white ground in layers or what artists called glazes.
You would paint a thin layer of color,
the oil would dry, and you would paint another thin layer
and each of these layers were translucent
and reflected the white ground underneath,
creating intensity and depth to the color
that was unprecedented in Italian painting before this
where tempera and fresco were the main media
that artists used.
Dr. Zucker: Oil was so different.
Not only did it allow for glazing, but it also stayed wet
and that meant that you could rework the surface.
Tempera dries very quickly and of course,
fresco is staining a patch of wet plaster and also has
to be done quite quickly and cannot be reworked.
Dr. Harris: Tempera is opaque.
In other words you can't see through it.
That, plus the fact that it dries quickly, meant
that when an artist wanted to show the modeling
of form, the movement from light to dark,
they had to use lines, a kind of hatching technique.
Dr. Zucker: And oil allows for the very soft modulation
of light and shadow.
Look, for instance, at the Christ child's left leg.
The light moves from a brilliance at the knee
that helps it project forward, to the shadows of the top
of the thigh that help it move back in space.
Dr. Harris: This is because oil paint stays wet
and it can be blended.
It's an oily substance.
Dr. Zucker: The Venetians essentially gave up fresco
in the late 15th century because Venice is a series
of islands and it was really a bad atmosphere for fresco.
So you have this division between
the Florentine tradition and the Venetian tradition.
Dr. Harris: Right, the Florentine tradition is one
where drawing is the most important.
That is line, not color.
That has to do, in part, with the Florentine interest
in fresco.
In a fresco painting, you need a final drawing,
because fresco dries quickly and you need to know
what you're going to do before you start painting.
What happens in the 1500s is that this early technique
of glazing that we see in the art of Bellini changes
when we look at Titian and Veronese and Tintoretto
later in the 1500s and they really exploit what oil can do
and the way that oil can allow for a very different kind
of process.
Dr. Zucker: That process allows artists to change things
on the fly, freeing them from being slaves
to the original drawings.
A good example of that might be Giorgione's Tempest
where we know that the figure on the left
was once a seated female figure.
Dr. Harris: And this idea of the artistic process
on the canvas itself.
Dr. Zucker: Directly on the canvas.
Dr. Harris: And working out your ideas,
having them evolve right in that same place
where the finished painting will eventually be
is something that's unique to the possibilities of oil paint
and something really exploited by the artist Titian.
Let's go have a look at a late painting by Titian
where we can really see this different approach
to oil paint.
(jazz music)