(piano jazz music)
- [Narrator] We're up on the second floor
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
looking at a small panel painting
by an Italian artist who's name is Gaddi,
one of the most prolific students of Giotto.
- [Narrator] This is an egg tempera painting.
- [Narrator] We generally think of old master paintings
as being oil paint of canvas.
- [Narrator] In southern Europe,
we have a tradition dating back
all the way to the middle ages of painting in egg.
Whereas oil painting is really a northern tradition.
- [Narrator] So why egg yolk?
- [Narrator] These artists are very concerned
with binding pigment, all of these colored powders,
etcetera, many of them mineral,
binding those colors to the wood panel,
the support that these works are often painted on,
in a way that's gonna be durable.
- [Narrator] And they were durable.
These are over 500 years old.
- [Narrator] These paintings are coming out of
a very highly refined tradition of painting guilds.
The way this would work is that as an apprentice,
you would train for often seven years under a master,
understanding not only how to paint beautifully,
but how to make sure that your painting
lasts for as long as possible with no visible change.
- [Narrator] And that makes sense given the subject.
We're looking at an image of Saint Julian.
- [Narrator] It's painted on poplar wood,
a rather soft wood, it's one that warps a lot over time.
- [Narrator] And we can see that the
surface does bulge toward the center.
- [Narrator] In fact, it probably would have done so
even more before it was restored in the 19th century.
A lot of these paintings have been
planed down from the reverse and mounted onto
a cradle, a rigid wooden structure in the back
that doesn't allow it to flex naturally.
We tend to think that deforestation
is a very contemporary problem,
but the hardwoods of Italy were already
deforested by the early and middle Renaissance,
so this is why they're painting on poplar.
They knew it wasn't the best wood,
they knew it would change but they didn't have a choice.
- [Narrator] And that's not the only change.
It's pretty clear that the lovely gothic arch
that the Saint is surrounded by
would have ended with its point.
But here it's been cut off.
- [Narrator] Almost all of the Renaissance
paintings that you'll find in museums around the world
are only small fragments of what would've been
very large alter pieces.
- [Narrator] It would have been part
of a multi-paneled polyptych.
And we need to of course,
think back to a period before air conditioning.
- [Narrator] Where are you suppose to
encounter this painting?
Certainly not here at the Metropolitan,
but in a church in northern Italy.
A non-heated, non-cooled environment,
super humid and super dry depending on times of the year.
And this is a very harsh environment for any work of art.
- [Narrator] Because the wood itself is expanding
and contracting and presumably there's the potential
that the paint itself could loosen.
- [Narrator] Wood has this ability to
expand and contract again, no problem.
Paint does not have that ability however.
And that's the reason why paint, very often cracks
so extensively on these panel paintings.
- [Narrator] Wood is absorbent
and so you wouldn't want to paint directly on the wood.
- [Narrator] What these artists and artisans would do
is use rabbit skin glue,
glue made from the skin of rabbits,
that's a size material.
In other words, it's a sealant of that wood
and it limits the ability of that wood
to absorb moisture.
- [Narrator] On top of the rabbit skin glue
an additional layer of seal is added.
This is known as gesso.
- [Narrator] The gesso or the ground
or the priming of the painting
is actually a mixture of rabbit skin glue again
and then some gypsum, calcium sulfate,
some white powder in other words.
This is an absorbent material,
which is now going to receive the egg tempera paint
and also in areas under the gold,
a material called bole, a kind of clay.
It's often reddish in color, it is in this painting,
and that clay is again mixed with rabbit skin glue.
So if there's a whole lot of glue
all throughout the layer structure of this painting,
it's part of the reason why it's so durable.
- [Narrator] Let's talk about the paint for just a moment.
Tempera is painted with a very small brush.
- [Narrator] That's right.
- [Narrator] With very fine brush strokes.
- [Narrator] Egg tempera dries quite rapidly
and is very difficult to work wet in wet
like you can with oil, brushing wet paint
into wet paint that's already on your panel.
Here this is much more like a drawing technique
because you have all these individual, crisp little lines.
The face here is incredibly well preserved
and we see all of these beautiful,
they almost look like pencil lines,
and really that's the tip of the brush,
we can imagine how painstaking this process is
to be able to make this degree of modeling
and illusionism essentially with pencil lines.
- [Narrator] But while the face is really well preserved,
the red garment seems to be kind of flat.
- [Narrator] Remember that these were in
churches for hundreds of years
and they were cleaned by, not conservators,
but monks and nuns, you know the candle soot
and the grime that would collect on these paintings
had to be removed with very strong materials,
urine and lye believe it or not.
These are very corrosive substances.
A lot of the upper brush work,
the higher layers of the paint,
sadly have been scrubbed off.
And this probably happened hundreds of years ago.
- [Narrator] It's a little misleading
to call this a painting because only about
50% of the surface is actually paint.
The rest of it is gold.
- [Narrator] Gold is one of the only
noble metals that we have.
It's a metal that doesn't tarnish.
The message here is yes, it is expensive,
it's luxurious, it's appropriate for a religious painting,
but deeply embedded in that meaning
is also the fact that this is timeless, it doesn't corrode.
- [Narrator] The gold leaf which is actual gold
that has been hammered very very thin,
then applied and burnished.
A smooth object is rubbed over it
and what we're seeing here is just a faint trace
of the original gleam that the gold would have had.
- [Narrator] This is water gilding technique.
The bowl is moistened slightly
and that's all the adhesion necessary for this
incredibly thin sheet of gold.
Now after the gold is applied,
there is small metal tools which make
all of these beautiful little indentations.
Again, we're not supposed to be at the MET,
we're supposed to be on our knees in candlelight
and that light is flickering and refracting
off of all those little nooks and crannies.
It's part of the magic of these paintings.
- [Narrator] It is too easy to forget about
the incense, the music, the lighting.
- [Narrator] The entire point of water gilding
is to make it look solid.
And even though we know there's just a
tiny thickness of gold leaf there,
these craftsmen were so good that they
provided the illusion of solid gold.
- [Narrator] So this is really an art of illusion,
trying to produce an object,
costly because of its labor,
that looked like it was costly because of its material.
- [Narrator] In the early Renaissance
we have this great paradox that on the one hand
where does this scene take place?
In a world of gold, perhaps that's heaven,
but at the same time, this figure is painted
quite illusionistically.
I can imagine talking to that Saint.
- [Narrator] And this artists was the student of Giotto
who is credited with dramatically furthering
the idea that he could represent figures
that looked as if they were in a world that we recognize,
that they had mass and volume, that they cast shadow.
- [Narrator] We have one foot in the Middle Ages,
this world of gold, but we have another foot
defiantly here on earth.
In other words, we have heaven on earth
and this is a very powerful motif
for these devotional paintings.
(piano jazz music)