Listen to part of a lecture in an art history class.

Listen to part of a lecture in an art history class.

P: We spend a lot of time talking about notable European painters, but today I want to talk a few minutes about the paint itself. Before most European painters started using oil paint, they used either watercolor or egg tempera.Now, the terms for the different types of paint refer to the liquid that the pigment, the color is suspended in. Most pigments don't start out as liquids. They come from minerals, plants, and other sources, so they have to be ground up and mixed with a liquid, water or oil or egg yolk primarily. Egg tempera is where you mix the pigment with diluted egg yolk to produce a thin paint. To make oil paint, you mix the pigment with oil and some kind of thinner like alcohol. After about 1500, most European artists were familiar with painting with oils.S: So the Europeans invented oil painting?P: Well, there's evidence of oil painting in different parts of the world throughout history. What we do know is that in Europe, oil painting began in Northern Europe and spread south, and the place where it was first used systematically was in Flanders, part of what's now Belgium around the 1400s.S: What made Flanders so special?P: Well, this was a time when the spice trade was booming. Spices, oils, and other materials were being shipped into Flanders from all over through a place called Bruges, which was Flanders' main port city. Among the many spices shipped into Bruges was saffron from India, which was used to make yellow paint. And all kinds of oils were arriving too, walnut, linseed, white poppy. So artists now had access to all these new spices, oils, and other things, and they were highly motivated to experiment with these ingredients.P: There are a couple of reasons why, any ideas?S:To save money maybe?P: Well, the ingredients weren't exactly cheap.S: Painters belonged to guilds at that time, right? Did it have something to do with these associations?P: Yes, in fact, there were guilds for every trade, like the bakers' guild, the goldsmiths' guild, and the painters' guild.Painting was also considered a trade. All the trades were monitored according to strict standards of craftsmanship. Each member of a guild had to progress through a rigorous education in the craft. And as with all the trades, technical expertise was valued above all. And for painters, it was no different. Artistic genius had little to do with anything. So in this sense, creating the perfect painting was regarded a little differently from baking bread, baking the perfect loaf of bread.For guild painters, the emphasis was on acquiring the technical know-how to render an image with near-photographic accuracy. It's no wonder, then, that painters were constantly looking for a medium to, say, capture the brilliance of a gold necklace or the subtle shadows in the folds of a red velvet cape. So you can see why there was an incentive to experiment with a new kind of paint.P: Also, Bruges was a rainy city filled with canals, so there was always a lot of moisture in the air. Naturally, painters were looking for ways to keep their paintings from deteriorating in the dampness. Oil paint was an improvement over egg tempera in that respect.S: Oh so tempera wasn't used anymore?P: No. People still painted in tempera. It's good for bright colors, especially, some of our most famous paintings were done with egg tempera.But there are some problems with it. Dark colors tend to look dull and muddy. Also, you usually have to paint everything in one sitting, because it's very hard to retouch the surface of a tempera painting once it's dried. But with oil, you don't have these problems. So, many artists gravitated toward this medium.Now, interestingly, certain details of making oil paint were kept secret. It was the job of a workshop apprentice to grind and mix the exact amount of pigment with the exact amount of other ingredients, like oil and alcohol. The secret was not so much in the ingredients themselves as in the proportions that the workshop master told the apprentice to use. You can imagine the hundreds of variations for the different colors given the varied nature of the pigments, not to mention the interaction of these pigments with the different oils.