Some works by artists of the Spanish Golden Age, including El Greco, Jusepe de Ribera, Zurbarán, and a guest appearance from Rubens and polychrome wood carving.
El Greco
From Jan van Eyck’s trompe l’oeil, through Tanner’s fiery cross, to the modern young Polish woman of Jacek Malczewski.
A whirlwind trip through the history of compositional chiaroscuro, from the Renaissance, through Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi, to Rembrandt.
It’s not a colour at all, say some, while the Impressionists wanted to banish it from the palette. But throughout the history of painting, the blackest black has remained vital.
In the hands, and brushes, of great artists, a religious set-piece becomes a succession of marvellous and highly innovative paintings.
We should add these Masters to the growing list of those with ‘painterly’ style, and consider whether Impressionism was a development of Venetian ‘colorito’ painting?
A glance through some of the unofficial history of visible brushstrokes and other painter’s marks.
The earliest landscape paintings – and very many since – have fundamentally been visual records of the world.
