Paintings by Michelangelo, Hieronymus Bosch, Grünewald, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Paolo Veronese, Jan Brueghel the Elder and others.
Michelangelo
The yolk of fresh hens’ eggs used as a binder for fine and thin brushstrokes, from about 1250-1500, and revived in 19th and 20th centuries.
Painting onto dry plaster using ‘secco’ isn’t durable, so ‘buon fresco’ was devised to apply paint to wet plaster instead. The technique is complex, painstaking, and resulted in the death of some of its exponents.
God seen as a master craftsman, forming the world, or a symbol of reason drawn from Blake’s own personal mythology? A painting explained.
Stories of the origin of the Italian pine and cypress trees, and a far more dubious account of Jupiter’s abduction that’s found in an advert for beer.
After the people of Aegina are almost wiped out by a plague, Jupiter gives its king an army of hard workers who became the fearsome Myrmidons in the Trojan War.
Often overlooked, a Tuscan master of the Renaissance, whose large frescos in the cathedral of Orvieto show the events of the Apocalypse and Last Judgement.
Key factors making oil paint most suitable include its slow drying, wide range of viscosity, and robust paint layer. But it has its rules too.
Unfinished paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Bonington, Bazille, Bastien-Lepage, Moreau and others.
Painted accounts of the great flood from Genesis, by Michelangelo, Elsheimer, Thomas Cole, JMW Turner and others.
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