In the first few years of his career, he was commissioned to paint a series showing stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. They are simply brilliant.
Tintoretto
One of the greatest painters of all time, the Venetian Jacopo Tintoretto, was born almost 500 years ago. Probably, and he wasn’t called that either.
From providing basic hospitality to those who couldn’t be nursed by their families, hospitals started to change during the Age of Enlightenment. But for many they were still the waiting room for hell.
The standard blue pigment for the Renaissance and on, until about 1710, it was used in many Old Masters before disappearing by 1800.
A beautiful, intense green used by the van Eycks, Tintoretto, Domenichino, and Renoir, it was never popular in oil paints, and quietly died out.
Arsenic sulphides, they were both used in alchemy, and used commonly in paintings from Ancient Egypt through to the late 29th century. Tintoretto loved them.
Was she abducted, seduced, or seducer? Victim or whore? Ovid’s pair of letters between Helen and Paris raises questions which many artists have tried to tackle.
What turns statues and copper roofs blue-green? ‘Copper rust’, the basis of the intense green pigment Verdigris, used by all the Masters.
Used since Roman times, it was common in the dress of saints. Highly toxic, it was progressively replaced by cadmium red in the late 19th century.
In the year ahead, Gustav Klimt, Ferdinand Hodler, Tintoretto, Egon Schiele, and several others: anniversaries which I will celebrate here.
The Eclectic Light Company 