From Dosso Dossi in around 1530, through Titian and Veronese in 1580, brushstrokes became more visible in fabrics, hair, and other passages.
mark-making
His sketches and studies are wonderfully painterly, but was he painting what he saw, or what he envisaged?
His vegetable-rich portraits are unique in painting. Were they just jokes and whimsies, or is there something more substantial to them?
His rough and gestural style turned his dark tales into the stuff of nightmares.
We still associate brushmarks with sketchiness, speed of painting, spontaneity, bravura, and panache – and smooth paint surfaces, assembled from multiple layers and glazes, as being heartless mechanical essays in technique.
Portraits by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Kauffmann, and others show extensive brushstrokes.
Was painterly style a Venetian phenomenon, or was it more widespread in the early sixteenth century?
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?
This extended essay is likely to change much of our thinking about painting, perhaps art in general. It may be the most important book about art of this decade.
An innovator with his painterly style, some have suggested that he was even Impressionist – a whole century before Monet.
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