In the opening years of the nineteenth century, Francisco Goya tried an experiment that nearly got him into serious trouble with the Inquisition, when he painted a pair of full-length portraits of the same woman.

No one knows who commissioned Goya to paint these, but he demonstrated that clothing can be just as erotically appealing as nudity. Skilful painting of fabrics, textiles and other clothing materials can be every bit as important as that of flesh, and is often even more demanding. That’s what this series is about.

There’s a commonly held view that little effort was put into the depiction of fabrics until the Renaissance.

That’s certainly not true of The Wilton Diptych, a jewel of egg tempera and gold leaf painted in around 1395-99, as shown in this detail. Many hours of labour with gold and fine brushes must have gone into fashioning these garments.

Cimabué’s Maestà was also painted in egg tempera a century earlier, between 1280-90. Although he made little attempt to distinguish surface textures, lightness and pattern are used in fabrics to create their folds.

The development of sophisticated oil painting techniques in the Northern Renaissance enabled a new, more detailed approach.

The appearance of vivid realism in painting depended on the depiction of surface textures and effects, which are crucial to distinguishing different skin, hair, and most of all textiles and clothing.

The Renaissance was also a period in which garment-makers used a wide range of fabrics and textiles for their visual effect. Cities like Florence had a good supply, not only from the local producers selling their wool through the city’s merchants, but through trade in textiles like silk from overseas. For contemporary painters to have ignored the properties of opulent garments would have been more than eccentric, and some, including Raphael, painted works in which garments appear breathtakingly real.

It was Raphael who became one of the leaders in the vivid rendition of surface texture, particularly in the clothing of subjects of his portraits. Portrait of a Cardinal from 1510-11 is notable for the lifelike modelling of flesh and attention to the surface textures of the fabrics. Three quite distinct fabrics are shown in this cardinal’s choir dress: the soft matte surface of the biretta (hat), the subtly patterned sheen of his mozzatta (cape), and the luxuriant folds of his soft white rochet (vestment).

Raphael sustained this through his later Madonnas, and in his Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi Rossi. The three figures are grouped closely together and in rich colour. Every surface texture is lifelike, from the polished metal sphere on the back of the chair with its carefully projected reflection, to the hair and fur.

Effective rendering of the surface texture of fabrics isn’t dependent on a meticulous approach. Soon after Raphael came more painterly treatments which were better suited to irregular folds and a more natural appearance. Impasto was also used to great effect.

Tintoretto’s Susannah and the Elders from about 1555 is an example of how effective these passages can be. The jewellery scattered about Susannah really pops out into the third dimension, and there’s an unusual softness about the cloth with which she is drying her leg. The detail below demonstrates how these have been achieved using more gestural application of paint in small blobs and rougher strokes.

Some artists put their brushes away and took to pastels to model fabrics.

Applying his pastels to a parchment ground and support rather than paper, Jean-Etienne Liotard was able to paint painstakingly detailed realist works like The Chocolate Girl (c 1744-45), seen in the detail below.

Although the Pre-Raphaelites wound the clock back in some respects, as far as the depiction of fabrics was concerned they were alongside Raphael. As one of the first Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces, John Everett Millais’ Isabella (Lorenzo and Isabella) from 1848-49 set the standard. Great care has gone into modelling each garment and its surface textures.

Great portrait painters of the nineteenth century were particularly skilled at the combination of painterly brushwork and vivid surface texture. That’s shown well in James Tissot’s Portrait of Mrs Catherine Smith Gill and Two of her Children (1877), seen in detail below.

I hope you’ll join me as I admire the silks and furs in future articles in this series.