painting

painting
/payn"ting/, n.
1. a picture or design executed in paints.
2. the act, art, or work of a person who paints.
3. the works of art painted in a particular manner, place, or period: a book on Flemish painting.
4. an instance of covering a surface with paint.
[1175-1225; ME; see PAINT, -ING1]

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I
Art consisting of representational, imaginative, or abstract designs produced by application of coloured paints to a two-dimensional, prepared, flat surface.

The elements of design (i.e., line, colour, tone, texture) are used in various ways to produce sensations of volume, space, movement, and light. The range of media (e.g., tempera, fresco, oil, watercolour, ink, gouache, encaustic, casein) and the choice of a particular form (e.g., mural, easel, panel, miniature, illuminated manuscript, scroll, screen, fan) combine to realize a unique visual image. Painting as an art form dates back to prehistoric cave paintings. The early cultural traditions of tribes, religions, guilds, royal courts, and states controlled the craft, form, imagery, and subject matter of painting and determined its function (e.g., ritualistic, devotional, decorative). Painters were considered skilled artisans rather than creative artists until eventually, in East Asia and Renaissance Europe, the fine artist emerged with the social status of a scholar and courtier. Fine artists signed their work and decided its design and often its subject and imagery. Over time painters have increasingly gained the freedom to invent their own visual language and to experiment with new forms and unconventional materials and techniques. In the early 20th century painters began to experiment with nonrepresentational art in which formal qualities such as line, colour, and form were explored rather than subject matter. Throughout the century styles vacillated between representational and nonrepresentational painting. In the late 20th century some critics forecast the "death of painting" in the face of new media such as video and intallation art, yet talented new artists repeatedly brought painting back to the centre of artistic production.
II
(as used in expressions)
Old Museum of Painting
Hill painting
still life painting

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Introduction

      the expression of ideas and emotions, with the creation of certain aesthetic qualities, in a two-dimensional visual language. The elements of this language—its shapes, lines, colours, tones, and textures—are used in various ways to produce sensations of volume, space, movement, and light on a flat surface. These elements are combined into expressive patterns in order to represent real or supernatural phenomena, to interpret a narrative theme, or to create wholly abstract visual relationships. An artist's decision to use a particular medium, such as tempera (tempera painting), fresco (fresco painting), oil (oil painting), acrylic (acrylic painting), watercolour or other water-based paints, ink, gouache, encaustic (encaustic painting), or casein (casein painting), as well as the choice of a particular form, such as mural, easel, panel, miniature, manuscript illumination, scroll, screen or fan, panorama, or any of a variety of modern forms, is based on the sensuous qualities and the expressive possibilities and limitations of those options. The choices of the medium and the form, as well as the artist's own technique, combine to realize a unique visual image.

      Earlier cultural traditions—of tribes, religions, guilds, royal courts, and states—largely controlled the craft, form, imagery, and subject matter of painting and determined its function, whether ritualistic, devotional, decorative, entertaining, or educational. Painters were employed more as skilled artisans than as creative artists. Later the notion of the “fine artist” developed in Asia and Renaissance Europe. Prominent painters were afforded the social status of scholars and courtiers; they signed their work, decided its design and often its subject and imagery, and established a more personal—if not always amicable—relationship with their patrons.

      During the 19th century painters in Western societies began to lose their social position and secure patronage. Some artists countered the decline in patronage support by holding their own exhibitions and charging an entrance fee. Others earned an income through touring exhibitions of their work. The need to appeal to a marketplace had replaced the similar (if less impersonal) demands of patronage, and its effect on the art itself was probably similar as well. Generally, artists can now reach an audience only through commercial galleries and public museums, although their work may be occasionally reproduced in art periodicals. They may also be assisted by financial awards or commissions from industry and the state. They have, however, gained the freedom to invent their own visual language and to experiment with new forms and unconventional materials and techniques. For example, some painters have combined other media, such as sculpture, with painting to produce three-dimensional abstract designs. Other artists have attached real objects to the canvas in collage fashion or used electricity to operate coloured kinetic panels and boxes. Conceptual artists frequently express their ideas in the form of a proposal for an unrealizable project, while performance artists are an integral part of their own compositions. The restless endeavour to extend the boundaries of expression in Western art produces continuous international stylistic changes. The often bewildering succession of new movements in painting is further stimulated by the swift interchange of ideas by means of international art journals, traveling exhibitions, and art centres.

      This article is concerned with the elements and principles of design in painting and with the various mediums, forms, imagery, subject matter, and symbolism employed or adopted or created by the painter. For the history of painting in ancient Egypt, see Egyptian art and architecture (art and architecture, Egyptian). The development of painting in different regions is treated in a number of articles; see Western painting (painting, Western); African art (art, African); Central Asian arts; Chinese painting; Islamic arts; Japanese art (arts, East Asian); Korean art (arts, East Asian); Native American art; Oceanic art and architecture (art and architecture, Oceanic); South Asian arts; and Southeast Asian arts. For the conservation and restoration of paintings, see art conservation and restoration. For a discussion of the forgery of works of art, see forgery. For a discussion of the role of painting and other arts in religion, as well as of the use of religious symbols in art, see religious symbolism and iconography. For information on other arts related to painting, see articles such as drawing; folk art; and printmaking.

Elements and principles of design
      The design of a painting is its visual format: the arrangement of its lines, shapes, colours, tones, and textures into an expressive pattern. It is the sense of inevitability in this formal organization that gives a great painting its self-sufficiency and presence.

      The colours and placing of the principal images in a design may be sometimes largely decided by representational and symbolic considerations. Yet it is the formal interplay of colours and shapes that alone is capable of communicating a particular mood, producing optical sensations of space, volume, movement, and light and creating forces of both harmony and tension, even when a painting's narrative symbolism is obscure.

Elements of design
      Each of the design elements has special expressive qualities. Line, for example, is an intuitive, primeval convention for representing things; the simple linear imagery of young children's drawings and prehistoric rock paintings is universally understood. The formal relationships of thick with thin lines, of broken with continuous, and of sinuous with jagged are forces of contrast and repetition in the design of many paintings in all periods of history. Variations in the painted contours of images also provide a direct method of describing the volume, weight, spatial position, light, and textural characteristics of things. The finest examples of this pictorial shorthand are found in Japanese ink painting, where an expressive economy and vitality of line is closely linked to a traditional mastery of calligraphy.

  In addition to painted contours, a linear design is composed of all of the edges of tone and colour masses, of the axial directions of images, and of the lines that are implied by alignments of shapes across the picture. The manner in which these various kinds of line are echoed and repeated animates the design. The artist, whether acting consciously or intuitively, also places them in relationship to one another across the picture, so that they weave a unifying rhythmic network throughout the painting.

      Apart from the obvious associations of some linear patterns with particular actions—undulating lines suggesting buoyant movement, for instance—emotive sensations are produced by certain linear relationships. Thus, lines moving upward express feelings of joy and aspiration, those directing the eye downward evoke moods of sadness or defeat, while lines at angles opening to the right of a design are more agreeable and welcoming than those spreading outward to the left.

Shape and mass
      Shape and mass, as elements of design, include all areas of different colour, tone, and texture, as well as individual and grouped images.

      Children instinctively represent the things they see by geometrical symbols. Not only have sophisticated modern artists, such as Paul Klee (Klee, Paul) and Jean Dubuffet (Dubuffet, Jean), borrowed this untutored imagery, but the more arresting and expressive shapes and masses in most styles of painting and those to which most people intuitively respond will generally be found to have been clearly based on such archetypal forms. A square or a circle will tend to dominate a design and will therefore often be found at its focal centre—the square window framing Christ in Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, for example, the hovering “sun” in an Adolph Gottlieb abstract, or the halo encircling a Christian or Buddhist deity. A firmly based triangular image or group of shapes seems reassuring, even uplifting, while the precarious balance implied by an inverted triangular shape or mass produces feelings of tension. Oval, lozenge, and rectangular forms suggest stability and protection and often surround vulnerable figures in narrative paintings.

      There is generally a cellular unity, or “family likeness,” between the shapes and masses in a design similar to the visual harmony of all units to the whole observed in natural forms—the gills, fins, and scales in character with the overall shape of a fish, for example.

      The negative spaces between shapes and masses are also carefully considered by the artist, since they can be so adjusted as to enhance the action and character of the positive images. They can be as important to the design as time intervals in music or the voids of an architectural facade.

      In many styles and periods of painting, the functions of colour are primarily decorative and descriptive, often serving merely to reinforce the expression of an idea or subject communicated essentially in terms of line and tone. In much of modern painting, however, the full-spectrum range of pigments available has allowed colour to be the primary expressive element.

 The principal dimensions of colour in painting are the variables or attributes of hue, tone, and intensity. Red, yellow, and blue are the basic hues from which all others on the chromatic scale can be made by mixtures. These three opaque hues are the subtractive pigment primaries and should not be confused with the behaviour of the additive triads and mixtures of transparent, coloured light. Mixtures of primary pairs produce the secondary hues of orange, violet, and green. By increasing the amount of one primary in each of these mixtures, the tertiary colours of yellow-orange, orange-red, red-violet, violet-blue, blue-green, and green-yellow, respectively, are made. The primary colours, with their basic secondary and tertiary mixtures, can be usefully notated as the 12 segments of a circle. The secondary and tertiary colour segments between a pair of parent primaries can then be seen to share a harmonious family relationship with one another—the yellow-orange, orange, and orange-red hues that lie between yellow and red, for example.

      Local hues are the inherent and associative colours of things. In everyday life, familiar things are described by particular colours, and these often are identified by reference to familiar things; the green of grass and the grass green of paint, for instance. Although, as the Impressionists demonstrated, the inherent colours of forms in the real world are usually changed by effects of light and atmosphere, many of the great “primitive” and classical styles of representational painting are expressed in terms of local hues.

      Tone is a colour's relative degree, or value, of lightness or darkness. The tonal pattern of a painting is shown in a monochrome reproduction. A painting dominated by dark colours, such as a Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn), is in a low tonal key, while one painted in the pale range of a late Claude Monet (Monet, Claude) is said to be high keyed. The tonal range of pigments is too narrow for the painter to be able to match the brightest lights and deepest darks of nature. Therefore, in order to express effects of illumination and dense shadow, he must lower the overall tonal key of his design, thus intensifying the brightness value of his lightest pigment colours.

      The Greco-Roman, Renaissance, and Neoclassical method of representing volume and space in painting was by a system of notated tonal values, the direction of each plane in the design being indicated by a particular degree of lightness or darkness. Each tonal value was determined by the angle at which a plane was meant to appear to turn away from an imaginary source of light. The tonal modeling, or shading, of forms was often first completed in a monochrome underpainting. This was then coloured with transparent washes of local hues, a technique similar to that of colour tinting a black-and-white photograph.

      Each hue has an intrinsic tonal value in relation to others on the chromatic scale; orange is inherently lighter than red, for instance, and violet is darker than green. Any reversal of this natural tonal order creates a colour discord. An optical shock is therefore produced when orange is juxtaposed with pink (a lighter tone of red) or pale violet is placed against dark green. Such contrasts as these are deliberately created in paintings for the purpose of achieving these dramatic and disturbing effects.

      The intensity of a colour is its degree of purity or hue saturation. The colour of a geranium, therefore, is said to be more intense, more highly saturated with pure orange-red than is mahogany. The pigment vermilion is orange-red at maximum intensity; the brown earth pigment burnt sienna is grayer and has a lower degree of orange-red saturation.

      Intense hues are termed chromatic colours. The achromatic range is made up of hues reduced in intensity by the addition of white, making the tints, or pastel colours, such as cream and pink; or of black, producing the shades, or earth colours, such as mustard and moss green; or of both white and black, creating the neutralized hues, or colour-tinged grays, such as oatmeal and charcoal.

 An achromatic colour will seem more intense if it is surrounded by neutralized hues or juxtaposed with its complementary colour. Complementaries are colour opposites. The complementary colour to one of the primary hues is the mixture of the other two; the complementary to red pigment, for example, is green—that is, blue mixed with yellow. The colour wheel shows that the tertiaries also have their colour opposites, the complementary to orange-red, for instance, being blue-green. Under clear light the complementary to any chroma, shade, or tint can be seen if one “fixates,” or stares at, one colour intently for a few seconds then looks at a neutral, preferably white, surface. The colour afterimage will appear to glow on the neutral surface. Mutual enhancement of colour intensity results from juxtaposing a complementary pair, red becoming more intensely red, for instance, and green more fiercely green when these are contiguous than either would appear if surrounded by harmonious hues. The 19th-century physicist Michel-Eugène Chevreul (Chevreul, Michel-Eugène) referred to this mutual exaltation of opposites as the law of simultaneous contrast. Chevreul's second law, of successive contrast, referred to the optical sensation that a complementary colour halo appears gradually to surround an intense hue. This complementary glow is superimposed on surrounding weaker colours, a gray becoming greenish when juxtaposed with red, reddish in close relationship with green, yellowish against violet, and so on.

 Hues containing a high proportion of blue (the violet to green range) appear (perception) cooler than those with a high content of yellow or red (the green-yellow to red-violet range). This difference in the temperature of hues in a particular painting is, of course, relative to the range and juxtaposition of colours in the design. A green will appear cool if surrounded by intense yellow, while it will seem warm against blue-green. The optical (optics) tendency for warm colours to advance before cold had been long exploited by European and Asian painters as a method of suggesting spatial depth. Changes in temperature and intensity can be observed in the atmospheric effects of nature, where the colours of distant forms become cooler, grayer, and bluish, while foreground planes and features appear more intense and usually warmer in colour.

      The apparent changes in a hue as it passes through zones of different colour has enabled painters in many periods to create the illusion of having employed a wide range of pigment hues with, in fact, the use of very few. And, although painters had applied many of the optical principles of colour behaviour intuitively in the past, the publication of research findings by Chevreul and others stimulated the Neo-Impressionists (Neo-Impressionism) and Post-Impressionists (Post-Impressionism) and the later Orphist (Orphism) and Op art painters to extend systematically the expressive possibilities of these principles in order to create illusions of volume and space and vibrating sensations of light and movement. Paul Cézanne (Cézanne, Paul), for example, demonstrated that subtle changes in the surface of a form and in its spatial relationship to others could be expressed primarily in facets of colour, modulated by varying degrees of tone, intensity, and temperature and by the introduction of complementary colour accents.

 While the often-complex religious and cultural colour symbologies may be understood by very few, the emotional response to certain colour combinations appears to be almost universal. Optical harmonies and discords seem to affect everyone in the same way, if in varying degrees. Thus, an image repeated in different schemes of colour will express a different mood in each change.

      Pointillism (a term given to the Neo-Impressionist (Neo-Impressionism) system of representing the shimmer of atmospheric light with spots of coloured pigment) produced an overall granular texture. As an element of design, texture includes all areas of a painting enriched or animated by vibrating patterns of lines, shapes, tones, and colours, in addition to the tactile textures created by the plastic qualities of certain mediums. Decorative textures may be of geometrical repeat patterns, as in much of Indian, Islamic, and medieval European painting and other art, or of representations of patterns in nature, such as scattered leaves, falling snow, and flights of birds.

Volume and space
      The perceptual and conceptual methods of representing volume and space on the flat surface of a painting are related to the two levels of understanding spatial relationships in everyday life.

      Perceptual space is the view of things at a particular time and from a fixed position. This is the stationary window view recorded by the camera and represented in the later periods of ancient Greek and Roman paintings and in most Western schools of painting since the Renaissance. Illusions of perceptual space are generally created by use of the linear perspectival system, based on the observations that objects appear to the eye to shrink and parallel lines and planes to converge as they approach the horizon, or viewer's eye level.

      Young children and untrained artists, however, do not understand space in this way and represent it conceptually. Their paintings, therefore, show objects and surroundings independently of one another and from the views that best present their most characteristic features. The notion of scale in their pictures is also subjective, the relative size of things being decided by the artist either by their degree of emotional significance for him or by their narrative importance in the picture (interest perspective).

      The conceptual, polydimensional representation of space has been used at some period in most cultures. In much of ancient Egyptian and Cretan painting, for example, the head and legs of a figure were shown in profile, but the eye and torso were drawn frontally. And in Indian, Islamic, and pre-Renaissance European painting, vertical forms and surfaces were represented by their most informative elevation view (as if seen from ground level), while the horizontal planes on which they stood were shown in isometric plan (as if viewed from above). This system produces the overall effect that objects and their surroundings have been compressed within a shallow space behind the picture plane.

      By the end of the 19th century Cézanne had flattened the conventional Renaissance picture space, tilting horizontal planes so that they appeared to push vertical forms and surfaces forward from the picture plane and toward the spectator. This illusion of the picture surface as an integrated structure in projecting low relief was developed further in the early 20th century by the Cubists (Cubism). The conceptual, rotary perspective of a Cubist painting shows not only the components of things from different viewpoints but presents every plane of an object and its immediate surroundings simultaneously. This gives the composite impression of things in space that is gained by having examined their surfaces and construction from every angle.

 In modern painting (Pop art), both conceptual and perceptual methods of representing space are often combined. And, where the orbital movement of forms—which has been a basic element in European design since the Renaissance—was intended to hold the spectator's attention within the frame, the expanding picture space in late 20th- and early 21st-century mural-size abstract paintings directs the eye outward to the surrounding wall, and their shapes and colours seem about to invade the observer's own territory.

time and movement
      Time and movement in painting are not restricted to representations of physical energy, but they are elements of all design. Part of the viewer's full experience of a great painting is to allow the arrangement of lines, shapes, and accents of tone or colour to guide the eye across the picture surface at controlled tempos and rhythmic directions. These arrangements contribute overall to the expression of a particular mood, vision, and idea.

      Centuries before cinematography, painters attempted to produce kinetic sensations on a flat surface. A mural of 2000 BC in an Egyptian tomb at Beni Hasan, for instance, is designed as a continuous strip sequence of wrestling holds and throws, so accurately articulated and notated that it might be photographed as an animated film cartoon. The gradual unrolling of a 12th-century Japanese hand scroll produces the visual sensation of a helicopter flight along a river valley, while the experience of walking to the end of a long, processional Renaissance mural by Andrea Mantegna (Mantegna, Andrea) or Benozzo Gozzoli (Gozzoli, Benozzo) is similar to that of having witnessed a passing pageant as a standing spectator.

      In the Eastern and Western narrative convention of continuous representation, various incidents in a story were depicted together within one design, the chief characters in the drama easily identified as they reappeared in different situations and settings throughout the painting. In Byzantine murals and in Indian and medieval manuscript paintings, narrative sequences were depicted in grid patterns, each “compartment” of the design representing a visual chapter in a religious story or a mythological or historical epic.

      The Cubists (Cubism) aimed to give the viewer the time experience of moving around static forms in order to examine their volume and structure and their relationships to the space surrounding them. In paintings such as Nude Descending a Staircase, Girl Running on a Balcony, and Dog on Leash, Marcel Duchamp (Duchamp, Marcel) and Giacomo Balla (Balla, Giacomo) combined the Cubist technique of projected, interlocking planes with the superimposed time-motion sequences of cinematography. This technique enabled the artists to analyze the structural mechanics of forms, which are represented as moving in space past the viewer.

Principles of design
      Because painting is a two-dimensional art, the flat pattern of lines and shapes is an important aspect of design, even for those painters concerned with creating illusions of great depth. And, since any mark made on the painting surface can be perceived as a spatial statement—for it rests upon it—there are also qualities of three-dimensional design in paintings composed primarily of flat shapes. Shapes in a painting, therefore, may be balanced with one another as units of a flat pattern and considered at the same time as components in a spatial design, balanced one behind another. A symmetrical balance of tone and colour masses of equal weight creates a serene and sometimes monumental design, while a more dynamic effect is created by an asymmetrical balance.

  Geometrical shapes and masses are often the basic units in the design of both “flat patterns,” such as Byzantine and Islamic paintings, and “sculptural compositions,” such as Baroque and Neoclassical figure tableaux. The flat, overlapping squares, circles, and triangles that create the pattern of a Romanesque mural, for example, become the interlocking cubic, spherical, and pyramidal components that enclose the grouped figures and surrounding features in a Renaissance or a Neoclassical composition.

      An emphasis upon the proportion of the parts to the whole is a characteristic of Classical styles of painting. The Golden Mean (golden ratio), or Section, has been used as an ideal proportion on which to base the framework of lines and shapes in the design of a painting. The Renaissance mathematician Lucas Pacioli defined this aesthetically satisfying ratio as the division of a line so that the shorter part is to the longer as the longer is to the whole (approximately 8 to 13). His treatise (Divina proportione) influenced Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer (Dürer, Albrecht). The Neo-Impressionists Georges Seurat (Seurat, Georges) and Paul Signac (Signac, Paul) based the linear pattern of many of their compositions upon the principle of this “divine proportion.” Golden Mean proportions can be discovered in the design of many other styles of painting, although often they may have been created more by intuitive judgment than by calculated measurement.

      Tension (stress) is created in paintings, as it is experienced in everyday life, by the anticipation of an event or by an unexpected change in the order of things. Optical and psychological tensions occur in passages of a design, therefore, when lines or shapes almost touch or seem about to collide, when a harmonious colour progression is interrupted by a sudden discord, or when an asymmetrical balance of lines, shapes, tones, or colours is barely held.

      Contrasts in line, shape, tone, and colour create vitality; rectilinear shapes played against curvilinear, for instance, or warm colours against cool. Or a painting may be composed in contrasted overall patterns, superimposed in counterpoint to one another—a colour scheme laid across contrasting patterns of lines and tones, for example.

Design relationships between painting and other visual arts
      The philosophy and spirit of a particular period in painting usually have been reflected in many of its other visual arts. The ideas and aspirations of the ancient cultures, of the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical periods of Western art and, more recently, of the 19th-century Art Nouveau and Secessionist movements were expressed in much of the architecture, interior design, furniture, textiles, ceramics, dress design, and handicrafts, as well as in the fine arts, of their times. Following the Industrial Revolution, with the redundancy of handcraftmanship and the loss of direct communication between the fine artist and society, idealistic efforts to unite the arts and crafts in service to the community were made by William Morris (Morris, William) in Victorian England and by the Bauhaus in 20th-century Germany. Although their aims were not fully realized, their influences, like those of the short-lived de Stijl (Stijl, De) and Constructivist (Constructivism) movements, have been far-reaching, particularly in architectural, furniture, and typographic design.

      Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were painters, sculptors, and architects. Although no artists since have excelled in so wide a range of creative design, leading 20th-century painters expressed their ideas in many other mediums. In graphic design, for example, Pierre Bonnard (Bonnard, Pierre), Henri Matisse (Matisse, Henri), and Raoul Dufy (Dufy, Raoul) produced posters and illustrated books; André Derain (Derain, André), Fernand Léger (Léger, Fernand), Marc Chagall (Chagall, Marc), Mikhail Larionov (Larionov, Mikhail Fyodorovich), Robert Rauschenberg (Rauschenberg, Robert), and David Hockney (Hockney, David) designed for the theatre; Joan Miró (Miró, Joan), Pablo Picasso (Picasso, Pablo), and Chagall worked in ceramics; Georges Braque (Braque, Georges) and Salvador Dalí (Dalí, Salvador) designed jewelry; and Dalí, Hans Richter (Richter, Hans), and Andy Warhol (Warhol, Andy) made films. Many of these, with other modern painters, have also been sculptors and printmakers and have designed for textiles, tapestries, mosaics, and stained glass, while there are few mediums of the visual arts that Picasso did not work in and revitalize.

      In turn, painters have been stimulated by the imagery, techniques, and design of other visual arts. One of the earliest of these influences was possibly from the theatre, where the ancient Greeks are thought to have been the first to employ the illusions of optical perspective. The discovery or reappraisal of design techniques and imagery in the art forms and processes of other cultures has been an important stimulus to the development of more recent styles of Western painting, whether or not their traditional significance have been fully understood. The influence of Japanese woodcut prints on Synthetism and the Nabis, for example, and of African sculpture on Cubism and the German Expressionists (Expressionism) helped to create visual vocabularies and syntax with which to express new visions and ideas. The invention of photography introduced painters to new aspects of nature, while eventually prompting others to abandon representational painting altogether. Painters of everyday life, such as Edgar Degas (Degas, Edgar), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de), Édouard Vuillard (Vuillard, Édouard), and Bonnard, exploited the design innovations of camera cutoffs, close-ups, and unconventional viewpoints in order to give the spectator the sensation of sharing an intimate picture space with the figures and objects in the painting.

Techniques and methods
 Whether a painting reached completion by careful stages or was executed directly by a hit-or-miss alla prima method (in which pigments are laid on in a single application) was once largely determined by the ideals and established techniques of its cultural tradition. For example, the medieval European illuminator's painstaking procedure, by which a complex linear pattern was gradually enriched with gold leaf and precious pigments, was contemporary with the Song (Song dynasty) Chinese Chan ( Zen) practice of immediate, calligraphic brush painting, following a contemplative period of spiritual self-preparation. More recently, the artist has decided the technique and working method best suited to his aims and temperament. In France in the 1880s, for instance, Seurat might be working in his studio on drawings, tone studies, and colour schemes in preparation for a large composition at the same time that, outdoors, Monet was endeavouring to capture the effects of afternoon light and atmosphere, while Cézanne analyzed the structure of the mountain Sainte-Victoire with deliberated brush strokes, laid as irrevocably as mosaic tesserae (small pieces, such as marble or tile).

      The kind of relationship established between artist and patron, the site and subject matter of a painting commission, and the physical properties of the medium employed may also dictate working procedure. Peter Paul Rubens (Rubens, Peter Paul), for example, followed the businesslike 17th-century custom of submitting a small oil sketch, or modella, for his client's approval before carrying out a large-scale commission. Siting problems peculiar to mural painting, such as spectator eye level and the scale, style, and function of a building interior, had first to be solved in preparatory drawings and sometimes with the use of wax figurines or scale models of the interior. Scale working drawings are essential to the speed and precision of execution demanded by quick-drying mediums, such as buon' fresco (painting) (see below) on wet plaster and acrylic resin on canvas. The drawings traditionally are covered with a network of squares, or “squared-up,” for enlarging on the surface of the support. Some modern painters prefer to outline the enlargement of a sketch projected directly onto the support by epidiascope (a projector for images of both opaque and transparent objects).

      In Renaissance painters' workshops, pupil assistants not only ground and mixed the pigments and prepared the supports and painting surfaces but often laid in the outlines and broad masses of the painting from the master's design and studies.

      The inherent properties of its medium or the atmospheric conditions of its site may themselves preserve (art conservation and restoration) a painting. The wax solvent binder of encaustic paintings (painting) (see below) both retains the intensity and tonality of the original colours and protects the surface from damp. And, while prehistoric rock paintings and buon' frescoes are preserved by natural chemical action, the tempera pigments thought to be bound only with water on many ancient Egyptian murals are protected by the dry atmosphere and unvarying temperature of the tombs. It has, however, been customary to varnish oil paintings, both to protect the surface against damage by dirt and handling and to restore the tonality lost when some darker pigments dry out into a higher key. Unfortunately, varnish tends to darken and yellow with time into the sometimes disastrously imitated “Old Masters' mellow patina.” Once cherished, this amber-gravy film is now generally removed to reveal the colours in their original intensity. Glass began to replace varnish toward the end of the 19th century, when painters wished to retain the fresh, luminous finish of pigments applied directly to a pure white ground. The air-conditioning and temperature-control systems of modern museums make both varnishing and glazing unnecessary, except for older and more fragile exhibits.

      The frames surrounding early altarpieces, icons, and cassone panels (painted panels on the chest used for a bride's household linen) were often structural parts of the support. With the introduction of portable easel pictures, heavy frames not only provided some protection against theft and damage but were considered an aesthetic enhancement to a painting, and frame making became a specialized craft. Gilded gesso moldings (consisting of plaster of paris and sizing that forms the surface for low relief) in extravagant swags of fruit and flowers certainly seem almost an extension of the restless, exuberant design of a Baroque or Rococo painting. A substantial frame also provided a proscenium (in a theatre, the area between the orchestra and the curtain) in which the picture was isolated from its immediate surroundings, thus adding to the window view illusion intended by the artist. Deep, ornate frames are unsuitable for many modern paintings, where the artist's intention is for his forms to appear to advance toward the spectator rather than be viewed by him as if through a wall aperture. In contemporary Minimal paintings, no effects of spatial illusionism are intended; and, in order to emphasize the physical shape of the support itself and to stress its flatness, these abstract, geometrical designs are displayed without frames or are merely edged with thin protective strips of wood or metal.

Mediums
      By technical definition, mediums are the liquids added to paints to bind them and make them workable. They are discussed here, however, in the wider meaning of all the various paints, tools, supports, surfaces, and techniques employed by painters. The basis of all paints is variously coloured pigment, ground to a fine powder. The different expressive capacities and characteristic final surface texture of each medium are determined by the vehicle with which it is bound and thinned, the nature and surface preparation of the support, and the tools and technique with which it is handled.

      Pigments are derived from various natural and artificial sources. The oldest and most permanent pigments are the blacks, prepared from bone and charcoal, and the clay earths, such as raw umber and raw sienna, which can be changed by heating into darker, warmer browns. In early periods of painting, readily available pigments were few. Certain intense hues were obtainable only from the rarer minerals, such as cinnabar (orange-red vermilion), lapis lazuli (violet-blue ultramarine), and malachite (green). These were expensive and therefore reserved for focal accents and important symbolic features in the design. The opening of trade routes and the manufacture of synthetic substitutes gradually extended the range of colours available to painters.

 A tempera medium is dry pigment tempered with an emulsion and thinned with water. It is a very ancient medium, having been in constant use in most world cultures, until in Europe it was gradually superseded, during the Renaissance, by oil paints. Tempera was the original mural medium in the ancient dynasties of Egypt, Babylonia, Mycenean Greece, and China and was used to decorate the early Christian catacombs (catacomb). It was employed on a variety of supports, from the stone stelae (stela) (or commemorative pillars), mummy cases, and papyrus rolls of ancient Egypt to the wood panels of Byzantine icons (icon) and altarpieces (altarpiece) and the vellum leaves of medieval illuminated manuscripts (illuminated manuscript).

      True tempera is made by mixture with the yolk of fresh eggs, although manuscript illuminators often used egg white and some easel painters added the whole egg. Other emulsions have been used, such as casein glue with linseed oil, egg yolk with gum and linseed oil, and egg white with linseed or poppy oil. Individual painters have experimented with other recipes, but few of these have proved successful; all but William Blake (Blake, William)'s later tempera paintings on copper sheets, for instance, have darkened and decayed, and it is thought that he mixed his pigment with carpenter's glue.

      Distemper is a crude form of tempera made by mixing dry pigment into a paste with water, which is thinned with heated glue in working or by adding pigment to whiting, a mixture of fine-ground chalk and size. It is used for stage scenery and full-size preparatory cartoons for murals and tapestries. When dry, its colours have the pale, mat, powdery quality of pastels, with a similar tendency to smudge. Indeed, damaged cartoons have been retouched with pastel chalks.

      Egg tempera is the most durable form of the medium, being generally unaffected by humidity and temperature. It dries quickly to form a tough film that acts as a protective skin to the support. In handling, in its diversity of transparent and opaque effects, and in the satin sheen of its finish, it resembles the modern acrylic resin emulsion paints.

      Traditional tempera painting is a lengthy process. Its supports are smooth surfaces, such as planed wood, fine set plaster, stone, paper, vellum, canvas, and modern composition boards of compressed wood or paper. Linen is generally glued to the surface of panel supports, additional strips masking the seams between braced wood planks. gesso, a mixture of plaster of paris (or gypsum) with size, is the traditional ground. The first layer is of gesso grosso, a mixture of coarse, unslaked plaster and size. This provides a rough, absorbent surface for 10 or more thin coats of gesso sotile, a smooth mixture of size and fine plaster previously slaked in water to retard drying. This laborious preparation results, however, in an opaque, brilliant white, light-reflecting surface, similar in texture to hard, flat icing sugar.

 The design for a large tempera painting traditionally was executed in distemper on a thick paper cartoon. The outlines were pricked with a perforating wheel so that when the cartoon was laid on the surface of the support, the linear pattern was transferred by dabbing, or “pouncing,” the perforations with a muslin bag of powdered charcoal. The dotted contours traced through were then fixed in paint. Medieval tempera painters of panels and manuscripts made lavish use of gold leaf on backgrounds and for symbolic features, such as haloes and beams of heavenly light. Areas of the pounced design intended for gilding were first built up into low relief with gesso duro, the harder, less absorbent gesso compound used also for elaborate frame moldings. Background fields were often textured by impressing the gesso duro, before it set, with small, carved, intaglio wood blocks to create raised, pimpled, and quilted repeat patterns that glittered when gilded. Leaves of finely beaten gold were pressed onto a tacky mordant (adhesive compound) or over wet bole (reddish-brown earth pigment) that gave greater warmth and depth when the gilded areas were burnished.

 Colours were applied with sable brushes in successive broad sweeps or washes of semitransparent tempera. These dried quickly, preventing the subtle tonal gradations possible with watercolour washes or oil paint; effects of shaded modelling had therefore to be obtained by a crosshatching technique of fine brush strokes. According to the Italian painter Cennino Cennini (Cennini, Cennino), the early Renaissance tempera painters laid the colour washes across a fully modelled monochrome underpainting in terre vert (olive-green pigment), a method developed later into the mixed mediums technique of tempera underpainting followed by transparent oil glazes.

      The luminous gesso base of a tempera painting, combined with the accumulative effect of overlaid colour washes, produces a unique depth and intensity of colour. Tempera paints dry lighter in value, but their original tonality can be restored by subsequent waxing or varnishing. Other characteristic qualities of a tempera painting, resulting from its fast drying property and disciplined technique, are its steely lines and crisp edges, its meticulous detail and rich linear textures, and its overall emphasis upon a decorative flat pattern of bold colour masses.

 The great Byzantine tradition of tempera painting was developed in Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries by Duccio di Buoninsegna (Duccio) and Giotto (Giotto di Bondone). Their flattened picture space, generously enriched by fields and textures of gold leaf, was extended by the Renaissance depth perspectives in the paintings of Giovanni Bellini (Bellini, Giovanni), Piero della Francesca, Carlo Crivelli (Crivelli, Carlo), Sandro Botticelli (Botticelli, Sandro), and Vittore Carpaccio (Carpaccio, Vittore). By that time, oil painting was already challenging the primacy of tempera, Botticelli and some of his contemporaries apparently adding oil to the tempera emulsion or overglazing it in oil colour.

      Following the supremacy of the oil medium during succeeding periods of Western painting, the 20th century saw a revival of tempera techniques by such U.S. artists as Ben Shahn (Shahn, Ben), Andrew Wyeth (Wyeth, Andrew), and Jacob Lawrence (Lawrence, Jacob) and by the British painters Edward Wadsworth and Lucian Freud (Freud, Lucian). It would probably have been the medium also of the later hard-edge abstract painters had the new acrylic resin paints not proved more easily and quickly handled.

      Fresco (Italian: “fresh”) is the traditional medium for painting directly onto a wall or ceiling. It is the oldest known painting medium, surviving in the prehistoric cave mural decorations and perfected in 16th-century Italy in the buon' fresco method.

      The cave paintings are thought to date from about 20,000–15,000 BC. Their pigments probably have been preserved by a natural sinter process of rainwater seeping through the limestone rocks to produce saturated bicarbonate. The colours were rubbed across rock walls and ceilings with sharpened solid lumps of the natural earths (yellow, red, and brown ochre). Outlines were drawn with black sticks of wood charcoal. The discovery of mixing dishes suggests that liquid pigment mixed with fat was also used and smeared with the hand. The subtle tonal gradations of colour on animals painted in the Altamira and Lascaux (Lascaux Grotto) caves appear to have been dabbed in two stages with fur pads, natural variations on the rock surface being exploited to assist in creating effects of volume. Feathers and frayed twigs may have been used in painting manes and tails.

      These were not composite designs but separate scenes and individual studies that, like graffiti drawings, were added at different times, often one above another, by various artists. Paintings from the Magdalenian period (Magdalenian culture) (c. 10,000 BC) exhibit astonishing powers of accurate observation and ability to represent movement. Women, warriors, horses, bison, bulls, boars, and ibex are depicted in scenes of ritual ceremony, battle, and hunting. Among the earliest images are imprinted and stencilled hands. Vigorous meanders, or “macaroni” linear designs, were traced with fingers dipped in liquid pigment.

      In the fresco secco, or lime-painting, method, the plastered surface of a wall is soaked with slaked lime. Lime-resistant pigments are applied swiftly before the plaster sets. Secco colours dry lighter than their tone at the time of application, producing the pale, mat, chalky quality of a distempered wall. Although the pigments are fused with the surface, they are not completely absorbed and may flake in time, as in sections of Giotto's 14th-century S. Francesco murals at Assisi. Secco painting was the prevailing medieval and early Renaissance medium and was revived in 18th-century Europe by artists such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista), François Boucher (Boucher, François), and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (Fragonard, Jean-Honoré).

Buon' fresco
 Buon', or “true,” fresco is the most durable method of painting murals, since the pigments are completely fused with a damp plaster ground to become an integral part of the wall surface. The stone or brick wall is first prepared with a brown trullisatio scratch coat, or rough-cast plaster layer. This is then covered by the arricciato coat, on which the linear design of the preparatory cartoon is pounced (see above (painting)) or engraved by impressing the outlines into the moist, soft plaster with a bone or metal stylus. These lines were usually overworked in reddish sinopia pigment. A thin layer of fine plaster is then evenly spread, allowing the linear design to show through. Before this final intonaco ground sets, pigments thinned with water or slaked lime are applied rapidly with calf-hair and hog-bristle brushes; depth of colour is achieved by a succession of quick-drying glazes. Being prepared with slaked lime, the plaster becomes saturated with an aqueous solution of hydrate of lime, which takes up carbonic acid from the air as it soaks into the paint. Carbonate of lime is produced and acts as a permanent pigment binder. Pigment particles crystallize in the plaster, fusing it with the surface to produce the characteristic lustre of buon' fresco colours. When dry, these are mat and lighter in tone. Colours are restricted to the range of lime-resistant earth pigments. Mineral colours such as blue, affected by lime, are applied over earth pigment when the plaster is dry.

      The intonaco coat is laid only across an area sufficient for painting before the plaster sets. The joins between each successive “day piece” are sometimes visible. Alterations must be made by immediate washing or scraping; minor retouching to set plaster is possible with casein or egg tempera, but major corrections necessitate breaking away the intonaco and replastering. The swift execution demanded stimulates bold designs in broad masses of colour with a calligraphic vitality of brush marks.

      No ancient Greek buon' frescoes now exist, but forms of the technique survive in the Pompeian villas of the 1st century AD and earlier, in Chinese tombs at Liaoyang, Manchuria, and in the 6th-century Indian caves at Ajanta (Ajanta Caves). Among the finest buon' fresco murals are those by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel and by Raphael in the Stanze of the Vatican. Other notable examples from the Italian Renaissance can be seen in Florence: painted by Andrea Orcagna (Orcagna, Andrea) in the Museo dell'Opera di Sta. Croce, by Gozzoli in the chapel of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, and by Domenico Ghirlandaio (Ghirlandaio, Domenico) in the church of Sta. Maria Novella. Buon' fresco painting is unsuited to the damp, cold climate of northern countries, and there is now some concern for the preservation of frescoes in the sulfurous atmosphere of even many southern cities. Buon' fresco was successfully revived by the Mexican mural painters Diego Rivera (Rivera, Diego), José Orozco (Orozco, José Clemente), and Rufino Tamayo (Tamayo, Rufino).

      Sgraffito (Italian graffiare, “to scratch”) is a form of fresco painting for exterior walls. A rough plaster undercoat is followed by thin plaster layers, each stained with a different lime-fast colour. These coats are covered by a fine-grain mortar finishing surface. The plaster is then engraved with knives and gouges at different levels to reveal the various coloured layers beneath. The sintered-lime process binds the colours. The surface of modern sgraffito frescoes is often enriched with textures made by impressing nails and machine parts, combined with mosaics of stone, glass, plastic, and metal tesserae.

      Sgraffito has been a traditional folk art in Europe since the Middle Ages and was practiced as a fine art in 13th-century Germany. It has been recently revived in northern Europe.

Oil
 Oil paints (oil painting) are made by mixing dry pigment powder with refined linseed oil to a paste, which is then milled in order to disperse the pigment particles throughout the oil vehicle. According to the 1st-century Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, whose writings the Flemish painters Hubert and Jan van Eyck (Eyck, Jan van) are thought to have studied, the Romans used oil colours for shield painting. The earliest use of oil as a fine-art medium is generally attributed to 15th-century European painters, such as Giovanni Bellini (Bellini, Giovanni) and the van Eycks (Eyck, Jan van), who glazed oil colour over a glue-tempera underpainting. It is also thought probable, however, that medieval manuscript illuminators had been using oil glazes in order to achieve greater depth of colour and more subtle tonal transitions than their tempera medium allowed.

      Oils have been used on linen, burlap, cotton, wood, hide, rock, stone, concrete, paper, cardboard, aluminum, copper, plywood, and processed boards, such as masonite, pressed wood, and hardboard. The surface of rigid panels is traditionally prepared with gesso and that of canvas with one or more coats of white acrylic resin emulsion or with a coat of animal glue followed by thin layers of white-lead oil primer. Oil paints can be applied undiluted to these prepared surfaces or can be used thinned with pure gum turpentine or its substitute, white mineral spirit. The colours are slow drying; the safest dryer to speed the process is cobalt siccative.

      An oil glaze is a transparent wash of pigment, traditionally thinned with an oleoresin or with stand oil (a concentrate of linseed oil). Glazes can be used to create deep, glowing shadows and to bring contrasted colours into closer harmony beneath a unifying tinted film. Scumbling is the technique of scrubbing an undiluted, opaque, and generally pale pigment across others for special textural effects or to raise the key of a dark-coloured area.

 Hog-bristle brushes are used for much of the painting, with pointed, red sable-hair brushes generally preferred for outlines and fine details. Oils, however, are the most plastic and responsive of all painting mediums and can be handled with all manner of tools. The later works of Titian and Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn), for example, appear to have been executed with thumbs, fingers, rags, spatulas, and brush handles. With these and other unconventional tools and techniques, oil painters create pigment textures ranging from delicate tonal modulations to unvarying, mechanical finishes and from clotted, impasto ridges of paint to barely perceptible stains.

      The tempera-underpainting-oil-glaze technique was practiced into the 17th century. Artists such as Titian, El Greco (Greco, El), Rubens (Rubens, Peter Paul), and Diego Velázquez (Velázquez, Diego), however, used oil pigments alone and, employing a method similar to pastel painting, applied them directly to the brownish ground with which they had tinted the white priming. Contours and shadows were stained in streaks and washes of diluted paint, while lighter areas were created with dry, opaque scumbles, the tinted ground meanwhile providing the halftones and often remaining untouched for passages of local or reflected colour in the completed picture. This use of oil paint was particularly suited to expressing atmospheric effects and to creating chiaroscuro, or light and dark, patterns. It also encouraged a bravura handling of paint, where stabs, flourishes, lifts, and pressures of the brush economically described the most subtle changes of form, texture, and colour according to the influence exerted by the tinted ground through the varying thicknesses of overlaid pigment. This method was still practiced by the 19th-century painters, such as John Constable (Constable, John), J.M.W. Turner (Turner, J.M.W.), Eugène Delacroix (Delacroix, Eugène), and Honoré Daumier (Daumier, Honoré). The Impressionists (Impressionism), however, found the luminosity of a brilliant white ground essential to the alla prima technique with which they represented the colour intensities and shifting lights of their plein air (plein-air painting) (open air) subjects. Most oil paintings since then have been executed on white surfaces.

 The rapid deterioration of Leonardo's 15th-century Last Supper (last restored 1978–99), which was painted in oils on plaster, possibly deterred artists from using the medium directly on a wall surface. And the likelihood of eventual warping also prohibited using the large number of braced wood panels required to make an alternative support for an extensive mural painting in oils. canvas, however, can be woven to any length, and, since an oil-painted surface is elastic, mural paintings could be executed in the studio and rolled and restretched on a wooden framework at the site or marouflaged (fastened with an adhesive) directly onto the wall surface. In addition to the immense studio canvases painted for particular sites by artists such as Jacopo Tintoretto (Tintoretto), Paolo Veronese (Veronese, Paolo), Delacroix (Delacroix, Eugène), Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes (Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre), and Monet (Monet, Claude), the use of canvas has made it possible for mural-size, modern oil paintings to be transported for exhibition to all parts of the world.

      The tractable nature of the oil medium has sometimes encouraged slipshod craftsmanship. Working over partly dry pigment or priming may produce a wrinkled surface. The excessive use of oil as a vehicle causes colours to yellow and darken, while cracking, blooming, powdering, and flaking can result from poor priming, overthinning with turpentine, or the use of varnish dryers and other spirits. Colour changes may also occur through the use of chemically incompatible pigment mixtures or from the fading of fugitive synthetic hues, such as the crimson lakes used by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Renoir, Pierre-Auguste).

 Watercolours are pigments ground with gum arabic and gall and thinned with water in use. Sable and squirrel (“camel”) hair brushes are used on white or tinted paper and card.

      Three hundred years before the late 18th-century English watercolourists, Albrecht Dürer (Dürer, Albrecht) had anticipated their technique of transparent colour washes in a remarkable series of plant studies and panoramic landscapes. Until the emergence of the English school, however, watercolour became a medium merely for colour tinting outlined drawings or, combined with opaque body colour to produce effects similar to gouache or tempera, was used in preparatory studies for oil paintings.

 The chief exponents of the English method were Thomas Girtin (Girtin, Thomas), John Sell Cotman (Cotman, John Sell), John Robert Cozens (Cozens, John Robert), Richard Parkes Bonington (Bonington, Richard Parkes), David Cox, and Constable. Their contemporary J.M.W. Turner, however, true to his unorthodox genius, added white to his watercolour and used rags, sponges, and knives to obtain unique effects of light and texture. Victorian watercolourists, such as Birket Foster, used a laborious method of colour washing a monochrome underpainting, similar in principle to the tempera-oil technique. Following the direct, vigorous watercolours of the French Impressionists and Postimpressionists, however, the medium was established in Europe and America as an expressive picture medium in its own right. Notable 20th-century watercolourists have been Wassily Kandinsky (Kandinsky, Wassily), Paul Klee (Klee, Paul), Dufy (Dufy, Raoul), and Georges Rouault (Rouault, Georges); the U.S. artists Winslow Homer (Homer, Winslow), Thomas Eakins (Eakins, Thomas), Maurice Prendergast (Prendergast, Maurice Brazil), Charles Burchfield (Burchfield, Charles), John Marin (Marin, John), Lyonel Feininger (Feininger, Lyonel), and Jim Dine (Dine, Jim); and the English painters John and Paul Nash (Nash, Paul).

      In the “pure” watercolour technique, often referred to as the English method, no white or other opaque pigment is applied, colour intensity and tonal depth being built up by successive, transparent washes on damp paper. Patches of white paper are left unpainted to represent white objects and to create effects of reflected light. These flecks of bare paper produce the sparkle characteristic of pure watercolour. Tonal gradations and soft, atmospheric qualities are rendered by staining the paper when it is very wet with varying proportions of pigment. Sharp accents, lines, and coarse textures are introduced when the paper has dried. The paper should be of the type sold as “handmade from rags”; this is generally thick and grained. Cockling is avoided when the surface dries out if the dampened paper has been first stretched across a special frame or held in position during painting by an edging of tape.

 Ink is the traditional painting medium of China and Japan (arts, East Asian), where it has been used with long-haired brushes of wolf, goat, or badger on silk or absorbent paper. Asian black ink is a gum-bound carbon stick that is ground on rough stone and mixed with varying amounts of water to create a wide range of modulated tones or applied almost dry, with lightly brushed strokes, to produce coarser textures. The calligraphic brush technique is expressive of Zen Buddhist and Confucian (Confucianism) philosophies, brush-stroke formulas for the spiritual interpretation of nature in painting dictating the use of the lifted brush tip for the “bone,” or “lean,” structure of things and the spreading belly of the hairs for their “flesh,” or “fat,” volumes. The East Asian artist poises the brush vertically above the paper and controls its rhythmic movements from the shoulder. Distant forms represented in landscapes painted on silk were sometimes brushed on from the reverse side.

      In the Western world, ink has been used rather more for preparatory studies and topographical and literary illustrations than as a medium for easel paintings. Western artists have generally combined ink washes with contours and textures in quill or steel pen. Among the finest of these are by Rembrandt, Nicolas Poussin (Poussin, Nicolas), Francisco Goya (Goya, Francisco de), Samuel Palmer (Palmer, Samuel), Constable, and Édouard Manet (Manet, Édouard). Claude Lorrain, Turner, and Daumier and, in the 20th century, Braque, Picasso, Reginald Marsh (Marsh, Reginald), Henri Michaux (Michaux, Henri), and John Piper are some of those who have exploited its unique qualities. Modern artists also use ballpoint and felt pens.

 Gouache is opaque watercolour, known also as poster paint and designer's colour. It is thinned with water for applying, with sable- and hog-hair brushes, to white or tinted paper and card and, occasionally, to silk. Honey, starch, or acrylic is sometimes added to retard its quick-drying property. Liquid glue is preferred as a thinner by painters wishing to retain the tonality of colours (which otherwise dry slightly lighter in key) and to prevent thick paint from flaking. Gouache paints have the advantages that they dry out almost immediately to a mat finish and, if required, without visible brush marks. These qualities, with the capacities to be washed thinly or applied in thick impasto and a wide colour range that now includes fluorescent and metallic pigments, make the medium particularly suited to preparatory studies for oil and acrylic paintings. It is the medium that produces the suede finish and crisp lines characteristic of many Indian and Islamic miniatures, and it has been used in Western screen and fan decoration and by modern artists such as Rouault, Klee, Dubuffet, and Morris Graves (Graves, Morris).

Encaustic (encaustic painting)
 Encaustic painting (from the Greek: “burnt in”) was the ancient method, recorded by Pliny, of fixing pigments with heated wax. It was probably first practiced in Egypt about 3000 BC and is thought to have reached its peak in Classical Greece, although no examples from that period survive. Pigments, mixed with melted beeswax, were brushed onto stone or plaster, smoothed with a metal spatula, and then blended and driven into the wall with a heated iron. The surface was later polished with a cloth. Leonardo and others attempted unsuccessfully to revive the technique. North American Indians (American Indian) used an encaustic method whereby pigments mixed with hot animal fat were pressed into a design engraved on smoothed buffalo hide.

      A simplified encaustic technique uses a spatula to apply wax mixed with solvent and pigment to wood or canvas, producing a ridged, impasto surface. This is an ancient and most durable medium. Coptic mummy portraits from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD retain the softly blended, translucent colouring typical of waxwork effigies. In the 19th century, Vincent van Gogh also used this method to give body to his oil pigment; the Neo-Impressionist artist Louis Hayet applied encaustic to paper, and it was used by the U.S. painter Jasper Johns (Johns, Jasper) for his iconic paintings of maps, targets, and flags. Coloured wax crayons have also been used by modern painters such as Picasso, Klee, Arshile Gorky (Gorky, Arshile), and Hockney.

 Casein, or “cheese painting,” is a medium in which pigments are tempered with the gluey curd of cheese or milk precipitate. For handling, an emulsion of casein and lime is thinned with water. The active element of casein contains nitrogen, which forms a soluble caseate of calcium in the presence of lime. It is applied in thin washes to rigid surfaces, such as cardboard, wood, and plastered walls.

      Casein colours dry quickly, although lighter in tone than when first applied. Since they have more body than egg-tempera paints, they can be applied with bristle brushes to create impasto textures not unlike those of oils. Casein paints were used in ancient Rome. They are now available ready-made in tubes and have been used by such modern artists as Robert Motherwell (Motherwell, Robert) and Claes Oldenburg (Oldenburg, Claes).

      Casein is also an ingredient of some charcoal and pastel fixatives and was a traditional primer for walls and panels.

Synthetic mediums
 Synthetic mediums, developed by industrial research, range from the Liquitex fabric dyes used on canvas by the U.S. abstract painter Larry Poons to the house enamel paints employed at times by Picasso and Jackson Pollock (Pollock, Jackson).

      The most popular medium and the first to challenge the supremacy of oils is acrylic (acrylic painting) resin emulsion, since this plastic paint combines most of the expressive capabilities of oils with the quick-drying properties of tempera and gouache. It is made by mixing pigments with a synthetic resin and thinning with water. It can be applied to any sufficiently toothed surface with brush, roller, airbrush, spatula, sponge, or rag. Acrylic paints dry quickly, without brush marks, to form a mat, waterproof film that is also elastic, durable, and easily cleaned. They show little colour change in drying, nor do they darken in time. While they lack the surface textural richness of oil or encaustic, they can be built up with a spatula into opaque impastos or thinned immediately into transparent colour glazes. polyvinyl acetate (PVA) or synthetic gesso is applied for priming, although it is claimed that acrylic paints can be safely applied directly onto unprepared raw canvas or cotton. The wide range of intense hues is extended by fluorescent and metallic pigments. Polymer paints are particularly suitable for the precise, immaculate finish demanded by Op art, Minimalist, and Photo-realist painters such as Bridget Riley (Riley, Bridget), Morris Louis (Louis, Morris), Frank Stella (Stella, Frank), and Richard Estes (Estes, Richard).

Other mediums
French pastels
 French pastels, with the sharpened lumps of pigment used by Ice Age artists, are the purest and most direct painting materials. Pastel pigments are mixed only with sufficient gum to bind them for drying into stick molds. Generally, they are used on raw strawboard or on coarse-grained tinted paper, although vellum, wood, and canvas have been also employed. These colours will not fade or darken, but, since they are not absorbed by the surface of the support, they lie as pigment powder and are easily smudged. Unfortunately, pastel colours lose their luminosity and tonality if fixed with a varnish and so are best preserved in deep mounts behind glass. Degas often overcame the fragile nature of true pastel painting by the unorthodox method of working on turpentine-soaked paper, which absorbed the powdery pigment.

 Eighteenth-century portrait pastellists, such as Maurice-Quentin de La Tour (La Tour, Maurice-Quentin de), Jean-Baptiste Peronneau, Jean-Étienne Liotard (Liotard, Jean-Étienne), Rosalba Carriera (Carriera, Rosalba), and Anton Raphael Mengs (Mengs, Anton Raphael), blended the pigment with coiled paper stumps so the surface resembled that of a smooth oil painting. Later pastel painters, such as Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Mary Cassatt (Cassatt, Mary), Everett Shinn, Odilon Redon (Redon, Odilon), and Arthur Dove (Dove, Arthur G.), contrasted broad masses of granular colour, spread with the side of the stick, with broken contours and passages of loose cross-hatching and smudging. They often used the tinted ground as a halftone, and, according to the amount of manual pressure exerted on the chalk, they varied the degree of pigment opacity to extract a wide range of tints and shades from each pastel colour.

Oil pastels
      Oil pastels are pigments ground in mastic with a variety of oils and waxes. They are used in a similar way to that of French pastels but are already fixed and harder, producing a permanent, waxy finish. Oil-pastel paintings are generally executed on white paper, card, or canvas. The colours can be blended if the surface of the support is dampened with turpentine or if they are overworked with turpentine. They are popular for small preparatory studies for paintings.

Glass paintings
      Glass paintings are executed with oil and hard resin or with watercolour and gum on glass sheets. These have been a folk art tradition in Europe and North America and, from the 15th to the 18th century, were regarded as a fine art in northern Europe, where they have been more recently revived by such painters as Willi Dirx, Ida Kerkovius, Lily Hildebrandt, Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, and Heinrich Campendonck. Colours are applied from the back in reverse order. Unpainted areas of glass are often coated with mercury, providing a mirror background to the coloured images; this creates the kind of illusionary, bizarre spatial relationship between the viewer and picture space sought by the modern artist Michelangelo Pistoletto with his use of photographic images fixed to a polished steel sheet. The colours seen through glass appear translucent, jewel-like, and, since they cannot be touched, even magical.

Ivory painting (ivory carving)
 Ivory painting was practiced in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and America for portrait miniatures. These were generally oval-shaped and designed as keepsakes, lockets, and mantle pictures. They were painted under a magnifying glass in fairly dry watercolour or tempera stippling, with sable- or marten-hair brushes on thin, semitranslucent ivory pieces. Corrections were made with a needle. The velvet quality of their colours was enhanced, on the thinner ivories, by the glow produced by a gold leaf or tinted backing.

 Lacquer has been a traditional Chinese medium for more than 2,000 years. It combines painting with intaglio relief. Linen-covered wood panels are coated with chalk or clay, followed by many thin layers of black or red lacquer-tree resin. The surface is polished and a design engraved, which is then coloured and gilded or inset with mother-of-pearl. Layers of compressed paper or molded papier-mâché have also provided supports. In China and Japan, lacquer has been used principally for decorating shrine panels, screens, caskets, panniers (large baskets), and musical instruments.

 Sand, or dry, painting is a traditional religious art (Native American art) of the North American Indians; it is still practiced in healing ceremonies among the Navajos (Navajo) of New Mexico and Arizona. Ground sandstone, natural ochres, mineral earths, and powdered charcoal are sprinkled onto a pattern marked into an area covered with yellow-white sand. The patient sits in the centre of this vivid symbolic design of coloured figurative and geometrical shapes. Following the ritual, the painting is destroyed. These “floor” pictures influenced Jackson Pollock (Pollock, Jackson) in his horizontally spread “action paintings (Action painting).”

 From the end of the 18th century, profiles and full-length group portraits were cut in black paper, mounted on white card, and often highlighted in gold or white. A silhouette (“shade”) might be first outlined from the sitter's cast shadow with the aid of a physionotrace. American artist Kara Walker (Walker, Kara) revived the silhouette technique with a series of controversial works that commented on race, gender, and class.

      Collage was the Dada and Synthetic Cubist technique of combining labels, tickets, newspaper cuttings, wallpaper scraps, and other “found” surfaces with painted textures simulating wood graining and marbling. Among the most lyrical and inventive works in this magpie medium are the so-called Merz collages by Kurt Schwitters (Schwitters, Kurt). frottage was Max Ernst (Ernst, Max)'s method of taking paper rubbings from surfaces, unrelated to one another in real life, and combining them to create fantasy landscapes. Cut paper shapes, hand coloured in gouache, were used by Matisse for his monumental last paintings; Piet Mondrian (Mondrian, Piet) composed his famous Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–43) in coloured-paper cutouts.

Mechanical mediums
      The use of mechanical mediums in painting has run parallel to similar developments in modern music and drama. In the field of cybernetics, painters have programmed computers to permutate drawings, photographs, diagrams, and symbols through sequences of progressive distortion; and light patterns are produced on television screens by deliberate magnetic interference and by sound-wave oscillations. Artists have also explored the expressive and aesthetic possibilities of linear holograms, in which all sides of an object can be shown by superimposed light images. Painters are among those who have extended the boundaries of filmmaking as an art form. Following the Surrealist (Surrealism) film fantasies created by Berthold Bartosch, Jean Cocteau (Cocteau, Jean), Hans Richter, and Salvador Dalí (Dalí, Salvador), by Schlemmer's filmed ballets and Norman McLaren's hand-painted abstract animations, some painters and other graphic artists experimented with video cassettes for television.

      For some Conceptual artists (conceptual art), word processors are the only equipment used when visual ideas are expressed in the form of instruction sheets alone. For example, printed proposals for defining the real space of an exhibition area with painted lines might invite the active participation of visitors.

Mixed mediums
      Some pictures are first painted in one medium and corrected or enriched with colour and texture in another. Examples of this kind of mixed mediums are the Renaissance tempera-oil technique, William Blake's relief etchings colour-printed in glue tempera and hand-finished in watercolour, and Degas's overpainted monotypes and his combinations of pastel, gouache, and oil. More recent examples are Richard Hamilton's photographs overpainted in oil colour, Dubuffet's patchwork assemblages of painted canvas and paper, and Klee's alchemy in mixing ingredients such as oil and distemper on chalk over jute and watercolour and wax on muslin stuck on wood.

Forms of painting

mural painting
 Mural painting has its roots in the primeval instincts of people to decorate their surroundings and to use wall surfaces as a form for expressing ideas, emotions, and beliefs. In their universal manifestation in graffiti and in ancient murals, such as cave paintings and protodynastic Egyptian frescoes, symbols and representational images have been spread freely and indiscriminately across walls, ceilings, and floors. But, in more disciplined attempts to symbolize the importance and function of particular buildings through their interior decoration, murals have been designed for the restricted framework of specific surface areas. They therefore have to be painted in close relationship to the scale, style, and mood of the interior and with regard to such siting considerations as light sources, eye levels, the spectators' lines of sight and means of approach, and the emotive scale relationship between spectators and the painted images.

 Early mural decorations for tombs, temples, sanctuaries, and catacombs were generally designed in horizontal divisions and vertical axes. These grid patterns were in harmony with the austere character of the interiors, and their geometrical plan enabled the artist to depict clearly the various episodes and symbols of a narrative subject. In these early traditions of mural design, in China, India, Mexico, Egypt, Crete, and Byzantium, no illusionary devices were used to deny the true flatness of the wall surface; images were silhouetted against a flatly painted ground framed by decorative dadoes (the decoration adorning the lower part of an interior wall) of stylized motifs in repeat patterns. By the early Renaissance, however, innovators such as Giotto (Giotto di Bondone), Masaccio, and Fra Angelico (Angelico, Fra) were placing figures within architectural and landscape settings, painted as if extensions to the real dimensions of the interior. The peak of technical skill and artistic expression was reached in the 15th and 16th centuries with the frescoes of Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, and Raphael. The irregular shapes of wall areas and the distortions produced by convex surfaces were inventively exploited in the design. Intruding doors and windows, for example, were skillfully circumvented by sweeping pattern rhythms or were incorporated as features in the painting, and figures were foreshortened so as to appear to float across or to rise into cupolas (rounded vaults that form ceilings), lunettes (rounded spaces over doors or windows), and apses (domed projections of a church, usually at the east end or altar), the curving surfaces of which might be painted to simulate celestial skies. Existing structural wall features provided the divisions between narrative episodes. These were often supplemented by trompe l'oeil (“deceive the eye”) columns, pilasters, arcading, balustrading, steps, and other architectural forms that also served to fuse the painted setting with the real interior.

  With the increasing dependence upon tapestry hangings and stained glass as primary forms of interior decoration, mural painting suffered a decline in the Western world. Except for those given to Rubens (Rubens, Peter Paul), Tiepolo (Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista), Delacroix (Delacroix, Eugène), and Puvis de Chavannes (Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre), there were relatively few important mural commissions in the period following the High Renaissance. In the 20th century, however, enlightened patronage occasionally enabled leading modern artists to execute paintings for specific sites: Monet (Monet, Claude)'s Water-Lilies series for the Paris Orangerie, for example, and other murals in France by Vuillard (Vuillard, Édouard), Matisse (Matisse, Henri), Léger (Léger, Fernand), Chagall (Chagall, Marc), and Picasso (Picasso, Pablo); in Mexico and the United States by Orozco (Orozco, José Clemente), Rivera (Rivera, Diego), Tamayo (Tamayo, Rufino), and David Siqueiros (Siqueiros, David Alfaro), and also in the United States by Matisse, Shahn (Shahn, Ben), Keith Haring (Haring, Keith), and Willem de Kooning (de Kooning, Willem); in Britain by Sir Stanley Spencer (Spencer, Sir Stanley) and Bawden; in Norway by Edvard Munch (Munch, Edvard); in The Netherlands by Karel Appel (Appel, Karel); and in Italy by Afro Basaldella.

      The easel, or studio, picture was a form developed during the Renaissance with the establishment of the painter as an individual artist. Its scale and portability enabled European artists to extend the range of themes, previously restricted to those suitable to mural decoration. Easel and panel forms include still life (still-life painting), portraiture, landscape, and genre (genre painting) subjects and permit the representation of ephemeral effects of light and atmosphere that the more intimate forms of Asian art had already allowed the painters of scrolls, screens, and fans to express. Although easel paintings are occasionally commissioned for a special purpose, they are generally bought as independent art objects and used as decorative focal features or illusionary window views in private homes. They are also collected as financial investment, for social prestige, for the therapeutic escapism their subject may provide, or purely for the aesthetic pleasure they afford.

      Panel paintings, by strict definition, are small pictures designed for specific sacred or secular purposes or as part of a functional object. Although these wooden boards are sometimes categorized as a form of “decorative” rather than “fine” art, the best examples justify their place in museums alongside great easel paintings. Among the functions they originally served were as predellas (the facings to altar-step risers); devotional and ceremonial icons; portable, folding diptych and triptych altarpieces; shop and tavern signboards; mummy cases; and panel decorations of carriages, musical instruments, and cassoni. Many of them were painted by acknowledged masters, such as Fra Angelico (Angelico, Fra), Paolo Uccello (Uccello, Paolo), and Antoine Watteau (Watteau, Antoine), as well as by anonymous folk artists.

Miniature painting
  miniature painting is a term applied both to Western portrait miniatures and to the Indian and Islamic forms of manuscript painting discussed below. Portrait miniatures, or limnings, were originally painted in watercolour with body colour on vellum and card. They were often worn in jewelled, enamelled lockets. Sixteenth-century miniaturists, such as Hans Holbein the Younger (Holbein, Hans, the Younger), Jean Clouet (Clouet, Jean), Nicholas Hilliard (Hilliard, Nicholas), and Isaac Oliver (Oliver, Isaac), painted them in the tradition of medieval illuminators. Their flat designs, richly textured and minutely detailed, often incorporated allegorical and gilded heraldic motifs. In 17th- and 18th-century Western portrait miniatures, the two-dimensional pattern of rich colours was developed by atmospheric tonal modeling into more naturalistic representations; these were sometimes in pastel and pencil or painted in oils on a metal base. Pantographs (pantograph) (reducing and enlarging copying instruments made on the lazy-tongs lever principle) might be used to transfer a drawing. Among the exponents of this naturalistic style were Francisco Goya (Goya, Francisco de), Fragonard (Fragonard, Jean-Honoré), Samuel Cooper (Cooper, Samuel), and François Dumont (Dumont, François). The introduction of painted ivory miniatures was followed, in the 19th century, by a decline in aesthetic standards, although a classical simplicity was achieved by unsophisticated itinerant limners and by the German miniaturist Patricius Kittner. The painted miniature was eventually superseded by the small, hand-tinted photograph.

Manuscript illumination (illuminated manuscript) and related forms
 Among the earliest surviving forms of manuscript painting are the papyrus rolls of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, the scrolls of Classical Greece and Rome, Aztec pictorial maps, and Mayan and Chinese codices, or manuscript books. European illuminated manuscripts were painted in egg-white tempera on vellum and card. Their subjects included religious, historical, mythological, and allegorical narratives, medical treatises, psalters, and calendars depicting seasonal occupations. In contrast to the formalized imagery of Byzantine and early Gothic manuscript painters, Celtic (Celt) illuminators developed a unique, abstract style of elaborate decoration, the written text being overwhelmed by intricate latticework borders, with full-page initial letters embraced by interlacing scrolls. The medieval Gothic (Gothic art) style of illumination, in sinuous, linear patterns of flattened forms isolated against white or gilded grounds, had developed, by the end of the 15th century, into exquisitely detailed, jewel-like miniatures of shaded figures and spatial landscapes. These were often framed by gilded initial letters as vignettes or by margin borders in simulated half relief. With the advent of printing in the 15th century and a final, brilliant period of Flemish and Italian illumination, European manuscript painting survived only in official documents, maps, and in the form of hand-coloured, block-printed pages. Pennsylvanian-German birth and baptismal certificates in the U.S. and William Blake's hand-coloured engravings to the Bible and to his own poems were isolated revivals of those forms.

 Indian (India) and Islamic (Islamic arts) miniature painting, however, was practiced into the 19th century; and 11th-century Asian albums of poem paintings in ink, on leaves of silk or paper, represent a tradition that was continued into modern times. The subjects of Middle Eastern (Near East) miniatures included religious and historical narrative, cosmic maps, and medical, palmistry, and astrological charts, as well as illustrations to poems, songs, and romantic epics. These were generally painted in gouache on paper, with occasional gold- or silver-leaf embellishment. The linear design was first drawn with a brush in delicate contours and soft shading. Landscape and architectural detail was as well observed as in that of the principal figures.

      The rapprochement established between text, painted borders, margin spaces, and illustration is characteristic of both Eastern and Western manuscript paintings. In Indian and Islamic miniatures, for example, the panels of decorative script are integrated within the overall pattern as areas of textural enrichment; and, with the margin and inset frames, these panels serve also as concrete screens and prosceniums to the action depicted, the participants in the narrative episode making their exits and entrances across or behind them.

  Hand scrolls, traditional to China and Japan, are ink paintings on continuous lengths of paper or silk. They are unrolled at arm's length and viewed from right to left. These generally represent panoramic views of rivers, mountain and urban landscapes, and domestic interiors. They also illustrate romantic novels, Daoist (Daoism) and Buddhist (Buddhism) themes, and historical and genre subjects. Narrative poetic commentaries were included as integral textures in the flowing design. The scrolls are remarkable for their vitality, the lyrical representation of atmospheric space, and for the rising and dipping viewpoints that anticipate the zooming motion-picture camera. The earliest surviving scrolls, such as Gu Kaizhi's The Admonitions of the Court Instructress, date from the 4th century AD. Asian hanging scrolls and Indian and Tibetan temple banners are forms similar to those of Western easel and panel paintings. Their subjects range from the seasons, domestic interiors, landscapes, and portraits to Vishnu epics, mandalas (mandala) (symbolic diagrams of the universe), and temple icons (icon). They are painted in ink or gouache on silk and paper and are usually mounted on embroidered or block-printed silk. The dramatic interplay of bold, flattened images against the open space of an unpainted or gilded ground influenced 19th-century Western Art Nouveau decoration.

Screen and fan painting
 Folding screens and screen doors originated in China and Japan, probably during the 12th century (or possibly earlier), and screen painting continued as a traditional form into the 20th. They are in ink or gouache on plain or gilded paper and silk. Their vivid rendering of animals, birds, and flowers and their atmospheric landscapes brought nature indoors. In some screens each panel was designed as an individual painting, while in others a continuous pattern flowed freely across the divisions. Japanese screens were often painted in complementary yin and yang (yinyang) pairs. Large 12-panel Chinese coromandel lacquer screens were imported into Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. French Rococo (Rococo style) boudoir screens depicting fêtes champêtres (fête champêtre) (townspeople enjoying rural surroundings) and toile de Jouy (landscape or floral) pastoral themes were painted on silk or on wood panels in a flamboyantly scrolled, gilded framework. The designs of Art Nouveau screens were inspired by the Japanese tradition. Sidney Nolan (Nolan, Sir Sidney)'s screens on Greek themes and the pastiches of Victorian paper-scrap screens by Pop art painters are recent Western revivals. Traditional to the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches is the iconostasis screen, which stands between the nave and sanctuary and displays icon panel paintings representing the Virgin, the saints, and narrative subjects.

 Rigid fans are depicted in the paintings and reliefs of ancient Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and Rome, but the oldest surviving specimens are the round and folding fans from East Asia. These were painted in India ink and colour on paper, card, and silk, the ground often sprinkled with gold dust or laid with gold or silver leaf. Spread freely across the mount, a calligraphic design depicted seasonal landscapes, genre scenes, and bird, flower, and animal motifs, with accompanying poems and commentaries. Leading Asian painters produced much of their finest work in this form. In Europe, however, where fan painting had been rarely practiced until the 17th century, it was considered a minor art, and designs were often based on frescoes and easel paintings. The richest and most elegant of these were painted in France and Italy during the 18th century. Watercolour and gouache paintings and hand-coloured engraved designs were made on paper, card, kid, and gauze. Allegories and romantic pastoral landscapes were frequently designed as separate vignettes, linked by floral swags and border scrolls. Both sides of the mount might be painted. The guards and sticks of the spoke framework were in delicately carved wood or ivory, inlaid with gold leaf or mother-of-pearl. Round hand-screens of parchment, mounted on handles like lollipops, were popular in early 19th-century English society. Charles Conder was a notable fin de siècle (“end of the century,” characterized by effete sophistication) fan painter, and, in the early 20th century, Oskar Kokoschka (Kokoschka, Oskar) decorated a lively set of fans on an autobiographical narrative theme.

Panoramas (panorama)
      Panoramas were intended to simulate the sensation of scanning an extensive urban or country view or seascape. This form of painting was popular at the end of the 18th century. Notable examples are The Battle of Agincourt (1805), by R.K. Porter, and the Mesdag Panorama (1881), by Hendrik Willem Mesdag. Panoramas might be compared to Cinerama films and enjoyed as a stimulating optical entertainment, along with cyclorama drums (large pictorial representations encircling the spectator), trompe l'oeil diorama peep shows, and the show box, for which Thomas Gainsborough (Gainsborough, Thomas) painted glass transparencies. More serious forms of panoramic painting are exemplified in Chinese Buddhist sanctuary frescoes, Asian hand scrolls, Dürer (Dürer, Albrecht)'s watercolour townscapes, Andrey Rublyov (Rublyov, Saint Andrey)'s 14th-century mural of Moscow, and Uccello (Uccello, Paolo)'s original sequence of three panels depicting the Battle of San Romano.

Modern forms
 The concept of painting as a medium for creating illusions of space, volume, texture, light, and movement on a flat, stationary support was challenged by many modern artists. Some late 20th-century forms, for example, blurred the conventional distinctions between the mediums of sculpture and painting. Sculptors such as David Smith (Smith, David), Eduardo Paolozzi, and Philip Sutton made multicoloured constructions; painters such as Jean Arp (Arp, Jean) and Ben Nicholson (Nicholson, Ben) created abstract designs in painted wood relief, and Richard Smith painted on three-dimensional canvas structures the surfaces of which curl and thrust toward the spectator. And, rather than deny the essential flatness of the painting support by using traditional methods of representing volume and texture, Robert Rauschenberg (Rauschenberg, Robert) and Jim Dine (Dine, Jim) attached real objects and textures to the painted surface, and Frank Stella (Stella, Frank) and Kenneth Noland (Noland, Kenneth) designed their irregularly shaped canvases to be seen as explicitly flat art objects. Rejecting earlier painting methods of reproducing effects of light with tonal contrasts and broken pigment colour, some artists made use of neon tubes and mirrors. Instead of simulating sensations of movement by optical illusion, others designed kinetic panels and boxes in which coloured shapes revolved under electric power. The traditional definition of painting as a visual, concrete art form was questioned by conceptual art, in which the painter's idea might be expressed only in the form of documented proposals for unrealized and often unrealizable projects. In performance art and happenings (Happening), which employed techniques akin to those used in theatre, the artists themselves became a kind of medium.

Imagery and subject matter
      The imagery and subject matter of paintings in early cultures were generally prescribed by tribal, religious, or dynastic authorities. In some Eastern countries, traditional models survived into the 18th century and even later. With the Renaissance, however, images and themes in Western painting, reflecting the new spirit of humanistic, objective curiosity and scientific research, came to be decided by the artist and his patron and, in later periods, by the artist alone.

Kinds of imagery
      Within the various cultures the art of representing things by painted images has rarely shown a continuously developing pattern toward greater realism. More often, religious and philosophical precepts have determined the degree of naturalism permitted. Rules governing portrayals of the human figure have been particularly stringent in certain traditions of representational painting, reflecting different attitudes to the cosmic significance of humans. For example, a belief in human inferiority in relation to an almighty deity is expressed in the faceless figures of early Jewish painting and in the stylizations of Byzantine imagery; and human insignificance against the dynamic forces of nature is symbolized in Chinese landscape paintings by man's puny scale within a monumental setting. An earlier view, which instead sought to glorify the spiritual, intellectual, and physical attributes of humankind, is typified in the noble figures of Greco-Roman art and in the renewed celebration of human physical beauty in the Renaissance and subsequent Neoclassical styles. The uniqueness of humans among living things and the expression of individual physical and emotional characteristics are exemplified in Japanese and northern European narrative and genre painting. Concomitant with the antipathy toward figurative representation in some cultures was a general distaste for the portrayal of all things of the exterior world, animals, landscape features, and other natural forms rarely appearing except as stylized images signifying spiritual forces of good and evil. The representational imagery of modern painting borrows freely from ancient and contemporary sources such as untrained and child art, Classical mythology, commercial advertising (advertising), press photography (photography, history of), and the allegories and fantasies of the motion picture and the comic strip. Nonrepresentational imagery is not restricted to modern painting but appears also in earlier forms such as Aurignacian (Aurignacian culture) (Paleolithic) decorative meanders, the scrollwork of Celtic illuminations, and the patterns of Islamic Kūfic (Kūfic script) calligraphy (an angular variety of the Arabic alphabet). And the abstraction of natural forms into rudimentary symbols, characteristic of modern painting, is echoed in the “pin-men” conventions of Magdalenian (Magdalenian culture) caves, in Aztec pictograms, and Indian and Tibetan cosmic-diagram paintings.

Kinds of subject matter
      The range and interpretation of subjects in different forms of devotional painting express a particular attitude to the relationship between man and God. Early Christian (Christianity) and Buddhist murals, for example, portrayed an all-powerful, remote, and mysterious being, painted as a flat, formalized head or figure whose stern gaze dominated the interiors of temples, churches, and sanctuaries. Christian Last Judgments (Last Judgment) and Buddhist hell paintings were intended to frighten believers, while subjects such as the Virgin enthroned, the Assumption, and Buddha descending from Paradise sustained their faith with hopes for salvation and rewards of blissful immortality.

      When the autocratic ecclesiastical control over Western painting weakened under Renaissance humanism, the religious narrative picture became a window onto a terrestrial rather than a celestial world. Both emotional and physical relationships between the figures depicted were realistically expressed, and the spectator was able to identify himself with the lifelike representation of a worldly space inhabited by Christ, his disciples, and saints, wearing updated dress and moving naturally within contemporary settings. This kind of narrative interpretation persists in the modern religious paintings of Sir Stanley Spencer (Spencer, Sir Stanley), where biblical environments are represented by the clipped hedgerows, the churchyards, and the front parlours of his neat, native English village of Cookham.

 Allegorical (allegory) narrative subjects might exalt the sensuous arts, as in the symbolic muses portrayed by Poussin (Poussin, Nicolas) and Luca Signorelli (Signorelli, Luca) and the paradisiac gardens of 15th-century French illuminated manuscripts (illuminated manuscript). But they might also carry warnings. In the 16th century, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder), for example, combined overt and often grotesque symbols with subtle visual metaphors to point stern morals in such paintings as The Triumph of Death (alluding to the “wages of sin”), The Land of Cockaigne (attacking gluttony and sloth), and Mad Meg (ridiculing covetousness). Even Bruegel's apparently straightforward genre subjects, such as The Peasant Dance and the festival of The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, conceal parables on human folly and sin, while Hieronymus Bosch (Bosch, Hiëronymus) introduced abstruse, allegorical phantasmagoria into such traditional narratives as The Temptation of St. Antony and The Prodigal Son and made his Garden of Delights an expression of disgust rather than of joy. Botticelli (Botticelli, Sandro)'s late paintings, probably produced under the influence of the 15th-century Italian monk and reformer Girolamo Savonarola (Savonarola, Girolamo), are other savagely pessimistic allegories: The Story of Virginia Romana and The Tragedy of Lucretia, representing virtue upheld only by death, and The Calumny of Apelles, in which envy, suspicion, deceit, guile, repentance, and truth are identified, like medieval mummers, by their costume, pose, and gesture. Rubens (Rubens, Peter Paul), however, found in allegorical symbolism a means of dramatizing mundane state commissions, such as The Union of Scotland and Ireland and The Bounty of James I (Triumphing over Avarice). Among famous 19th-century allegories are Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People and Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (Prud'hon, Pierre-Paul)'s Crime Pursued by Vengeance and Justice.

 Possibly the highest achievements in narrative illustrations to poetry and literature are found in Eastern miniatures and Asian scrolls, such as the Persian paintings of Ferdowsī's 11th-century national epic poem, the Shāh-nāmeh, and the 12th-century Japanese scrolls of the Genji monogatari and the Story of Ben Dainagon. An example of modern literary painting is Sir Sidney Nolan (Nolan, Sir Sidney)'s narrative series portraying the Australian folklore hero Ned Kelly (Kelly, Ned).

      Ancient Greek and Roman mythologies have provided Western artists with rich sources of imagery and subject matter and with opportunities for painting the nude. Historical narrative painting includes Classical mythology and heroic legend, as well as the representation of contemporary events; examples include Benjamin West (West, Benjamin)'s Death of Wolfe, Théodore Géricault (Géricault, Théodore)'s Raft of the Medusa, and Goya's The 3rd of May in Madrid.

 The earliest surviving portraits of particular persons are probably the serene, idealized faces painted on the front and inside surfaces of dynastic Egyptian sarcophagi (sarcophagus). The human individuality of the Roman mummy portraits of the 1st and 2nd century AD, however, suggests more authentic likenesses. Although portraits are among the highest achievements in painting, the subject poses special problems for the artist commissioned to paint a notable contemporary. The portraits of patrons by artists such as Raphael, Rubens, Hyacinthe Rigaud (Rigaud, Hyacinthe), Antoine-Jean Gros (Gros, Antoine-Jean, Baron), Jacques-Louis David (David, Jacques-Louis), and Sir Thomas Lawrence (Lawrence, Sir Thomas) were required to express nobility, grace, and authority, just as the sultans and rajahs portrayed on frontispieces to Persian and Indian illuminated books and albums had understandably to be flattered as benevolent despots. Such concessions to the sitter's vanity and social position seem to have been disregarded, however, in the convincing likenesses by more objective realists such as Robert Campin (Campin, Robert), Dürer, Jan van Eyck, Velázquez, Goya, and Gustave Courbet (Courbet, Gustave). Probably the finest are the self-portraits and studies of ordinary people by Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) and van Gogh (Gogh, Vincent van), where psychological insight, emotional empathy, and aesthetic values are fused. A more decorative approach to the subject is seen in the flattened portraits by Holbein, the Elizabethan and itinerant naïve U.S. limners, and the East Asian paintings of ancestors, poets, priests, and emperors. Like these paintings, the full-length portraits by Boucher, Gainsborough, Kees van Dongen (Dongen, Kees van), and Matisse display as much regard for the texture and form of their sitters' dress as for their facial features.

      Photography (photography, technology of) changed the practice of portraiture in painting for much of the 20th century, except where artists such as Cézanne and Braque used it as a subject for structural research or—like Amedeo Modigliani (Modigliani, Amedeo), Chaim Soutine (Soutine, Chaim), and Francis Bacon (Bacon, Francis)—for the expression of a personal vision beyond the scope of the camera. In roughly the last third of the 20th century, however, a number of painters, including Lucian Freud (Freud, Lucian), Leon Kossoff, Francesco Clemente (Clemente, Francesco), Chuck Close (Close, Chuck), and Alex Katz (Katz, Alex), again took up portraiture.

  Genre (genre painting) subjects are scenes from everyday life. Hunting expeditions and tribal rituals figure in prehistoric rock paintings. Domestic and agricultural occupations, with banquet scenes of feasting, dancing, and music, were traditional subjects for ancient Egyptian tomb murals. East Asian hand scrolls, albums, and screens brilliantly describe court ceremonies, the bustle of towns, and the hardships of the countryside. The depiction of earthly pursuits was forbidden under the strict iconography prescribed by the early Christian Church, but the later illuminated Books of Hours (book of hours) provide enchanting records of the festivals and occupations of northern European communities. In Renaissance painting, genre subjects were generally restricted to background features of portraits and historical narratives. Domestic scenes, however, not only provided Bruegel with subjects for moral allegories but, as with Rembrandt, were used to counterpoint the emotional intensity of a dramatic religious theme. The withdrawal of religious patronage in northern Europe directed painters toward secular subjects. The rich period of genre painting in the 17th-century Netherlands (Holland) is represented by the interiors, conversation pieces, and scenes of work and play by David Teniers the Younger (Teniers, David, The Younger), Frans Hals (Hals, Frans), Jan Steen (Steen, Jan), Judith Leyster (Leyster, Judith), Gerard Terborch (Terborch, Gerard), Pieter de Hooch (Hooch, Pieter de), Adriaen van Ostade (Ostade, Adriaen van), and, the finest, by Johannes Vermeer (Vermeer, Johannes). Pictures of rustic life had a special appeal for collectors in 18th-century France and England (United Kingdom); these were the somewhat picturesque representations of peasant life painted by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (Greuze, Jean-Baptiste), Boucher (Boucher, François), George Morland (Morland, George), and Gainsborough (Gainsborough, Thomas). Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon)'s paintings of servants and children, however, exhibit a timeless dignity and grandeur. The harsher realities of working life were depicted by Jean-François Millet (Millet, Jean-François), Daumier, Courbet, van Gogh, and Degas; the robust gaiety of cafés and music halls was captured by Toulouse-Lautrec, John Sloan (Sloan, John French), Everett Shinn, and Walter Richard Sickert (Sickert, Walter Richard); and intimate domestic scenes were recorded by Bonnard and Vuillard. Modern genre movements have included the American Scene painters, the Ashcan (Ashcan School) and Kitchen Sink schools (represented by such painters as George Wesley Bellows (Bellows, George Wesley), Jack Smith, and Derrick Greaves), the Camden Town (Camden Town Group) and Euston Road groups (Frederick Spencer Gore, Sir William Coldstream, and Victor Pasmore), and the Social Realists in England and in the United States (Robert Henri (Henri, Robert), Stuart Davis (Davis, Stuart), and Maurice Prendergast (Prendergast, Maurice Brazil)).

  Idealized landscapes were common subjects for fresco decoration in Roman villas. Landscape painting (as exemplified by a Chinese landscape scroll by Gu Kaizhi dating from the 4th century) was an established tradition in East Asia, where themes such as the seasons and the elements held a spiritual significance. In Europe, imaginary landscapes decorated 15th-century Books of Hours. The first naturalistic landscapes were painted by Dürer and Bruegel. Landscapes appeared in most Renaissance paintings, however, only as settings to portraits and figure compositions. It was not until the 17th-century Dutch and Flemish schools—of Rembrandt, Jacob van Ruisdael (Ruisdael, Jacob van), Meindert Hobbema (Hobbema, Meindert), Aelbert Cuyp (Cuyp, Aelbert), Rubens, and Hercules Seghers (Seghers, Hercules Pietersz)—that they were accepted in the West as independent subjects. The most significant developments in 19th-century painting, however, were made through the landscapes of the Impressionists (Impressionism) and the Neo-Impressionists and Post-Impressionists (Post-Impressionism). Styles in landscape painting range from the tranquil, classically idealized world of Poussin and Claude, the precise, canal topography of Francesco Guardi (Guardi, Francesco) and Canaletto and the structural analyses of Cézanne to the poetic romanticism of Samuel Palmer and the later Constables and Turners and the exultant pantheism of Rubens and van Gogh. Modern landscapes vary in approach from the Expressionism of Oskar Kokoschka's cities and rivers, Maurice de Vlaminck (Vlaminck, Maurice de)'s wintry countrysides, and John Marin (Marin, John)'s crystalline seascapes to the metaphysical country of Ernst (Ernst, Max), Dalí (Dalí, Salvador), and René Magritte (Magritte, René) and the semi-abstract coastlines of Nicolas de Stael, Maria Elena Vieira da Silva (Vieira da Silva, Maria Elena), and Richard Diebenkorn.

      The earliest European still-life painting is usually attributed to Jacopo de' Barbari (Barbari, Jacopo de') (i.e., Dead Bird, 1504). In Western paintings, still life often appears as a minor feature of the design; but until the 17th century it was not generally painted for its own sake, although it was already traditional to East Asian art. The subject is particularly associated with northern European painting, and the choice of objects very often has a religious or literary significance: wine, water, and bread symbolizing the Passion; skulls, hourglasses, and candles, the transience of life; and selected flowers and fruits, the seasons. Flower painting, especially, held a spiritual and emotional meaning for Japanese artists and for 19th-century European painters, such as Odilon Redon (Redon, Odilon), Paul Gauguin (Gauguin, Paul), and van Gogh. Still life has been expressed in many different ways: Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Arcimboldo, Giuseppe)'s witty arrangements of fruit, flowers, and vegetables made into fantastic allegorical heads and figures; the sensuous representation of food by Frans Snyders (Snyders, Frans), Goya (Goya, Francisco de), and William Merritt Chase (Chase, William Merritt); the trompe l'oeil illusionism of Alexandre-François Desportes (Desportes, Alexandre-François) and William Harnett (Harnett, William); the formal decoration of folk artists or untrained artists such as Henri Rousseau (Rousseau, Henri) and Séraphine and of modern painters such as Matisse, Dufy, and Pat Caulfield; the semi-abstract designs of Picasso, Gris, and William Scott; and, probably at its highest level of expression, the majestic still lifes of Chardin, Cézanne, and Giorgio Morandi.

Other subjects
 Since ancient times, animals (animal) and birds have provided the primary subject matter of a painting or have been included in a design for their symbolic importance. In the paintings of prehistoric caves and dynastic Egyptian tombs, for example, animals are portrayed with a higher degree of naturalism than human figures. Their texture, movement, and structure have provided some artists with a primary source of inspiration: the classical, anatomical grace of a George Stubbs (Stubbs, George) racehorse and a more romantic interpretation in the ferocious energy of a Rubens and Géricault stallion; the vivid expression of rhythmically co-ordinated movements of deer by Tawaraya Sotatsu (Sōtatsu) and Antonio Pisanello (Pisanello, Il); the weight and volume of George Morland's pigs and Paul Potter (Potter, Paulus)'s cows; the humanized creatures of Gothic bestiaries and of Edward Hicks's Peaceable Kingdom; and, finally, Dürer's The Hare, which is possibly as famous as Leonardo's Mona Lisa.

      Increasing interest is shown in notable painters' versions of other artists' works. These are not academic copies (such as the study made by Matisse, when a student, of Chardin's La Raie) but creative transcriptions. Examples that can be appreciated as original paintings are those by Miró of Sorgh's Lute Player; by Watteau of Rubens's Apotheosis of James I; by Degas of Bellini's Jealous Husband; by Caulfield of Delacroix's Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi; by Larry Rivers of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's Mlle Rivière; and by Picasso of Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Velázquez's Las Meñinas, and Delacroix's Woman of Algiers (which produced Roy Lichtenstein's Femmes d'Alger, After Picasso, After Delacroix). Picasso has also painted free versions of works by El Greco (Greco, El), Lucas Cranach (Cranach, Lucas, the Elder), Poussin, and Courbet, as Rubens had of Mantegna and Titian, Rembrandt of Persian and Indian miniatures, Cézanne of Rubens and El Greco, and van Gogh of Millet, Gustave Doré (Doré, Gustave), and Delacroix.

      In an abstract painting (abstract art), ideas, emotions, and visual sensations are communicated solely through lines, shapes, colours, and textures that have no representational significance. The subject of an abstract painting may be therefore a proposition about the creative painting process itself or exclusively about the formal elements of painting, demonstrating the behaviour of juxtaposed colours and shapes and the movements and tensions between them, their optical metamorphosis and spatial (space) ambiguities. Many abstracts, however, are more than visual formal exercises and produce physical and emotional reactions in the spectator to illusions of shapes and colours that appear to rise and fall, recede and advance, balance and float, disintegrate and re-form; or of moods created of joy, sadness, peace, or foreboding; or of effects produced by light or by flickering or throbbing movement. Some abstracts evoke the atmosphere of a particular time, place, or event; and then their titles may be significant: Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (Robert Motherwell); Late Morning (Bridget Riley); Broadway Boogie Woogie (Piet Mondrian); Gold of Venice (Lucio Fontana); Capricious Forms (Wassily Kandinsky).

Symbolism
 Most early cultures developed iconographic systems (iconography) that included prescriptions for the site, design, function, form, medium, subject matter, and imagery of their painting. The siting of early Byzantine murals (Byzantine art), for instance, echoed the symbolic, architectural planning of the basilica. Thus, a stylized, linear image of Christ (Jesus Christ), surrounded by heavenly hosts, occupied the central dome; the Virgin was represented in the apse; and stiff figures of apostles, prophets, martyrs, and patriarchs occupied the aisle walls. The format of early devotional paintings was also prescribed, Christian (Christianity) and Buddhist (Buddhism) deities being placed in the focal centre of the design, above the eye level of the audience and larger than surrounding figures. And, in the conventional arrangement of a Christian subject such as the Holy Trinity, a central, bearded, patriarchal God, flanked by archangels, presented Christ on the cross; between them was a dove, representing the Holy Spirit. In a rendering of the risen Christ, the Son faced the audience, with the Virgin Mother on the left and St. John on the right of the design. In East Asia a traditional format depicted Buddha on a lotus throne or in a high chariot drawn by oxen across clouds, surrounded by figures representing the planets. Deities generally appear against undefined grounds of white (signifying eternity or nothingness), blue (the celestial vaults), or gold (representing heavenly light by radiating lines or the spiritual aura by a nimbus). The elaborate surface preparation of supports and the painstaking execution with the finest materials symbolized the intention that paintings dedicated to a deity should last forever. The imagery, subject matter, and form might also have a mystical function: the realistic rendering of animals in contrast to the perfunctory human representations in Ice Age rock paintings, thought to signify a wishful guarantee for success in hunting; the earthly pleasures depicted on ancient Egyptian tomb murals intended to secure their continuance for the deceased; and the North American Indian sand paintings designed for magic healing ceremonies and the Tantric (relating to Tantrism, a school of Mahayana Buddhism (Mahayana)) mandalas used for meditation and enlightenment.

 Symbolism in Eastern painting—intended to deepen the experience of a picture's mood and spirituality—is more generalized and poetic than in Western art. Both the execution and the subject matter of Buddhist Chinese and Japanese (arts, East Asian) painting have a religious or metaphysical significance: the artist's intuitive, calligraphic brush movements symbolizing his mystical empathy with nature and his cyclic landscape and flower subjects expressing his belief in the spiritual harmony of natural forms and forces. Much of Indian (India) symbolism is visually emotive, images such as snakes, plantain leaves, twining creepers, and rippling water being overtly sexual. And, although symbolic attributes and colour codes identify Indian mythological characters (for example, the four arms of the terrible goddess Kali and the blue skin of the divine lover Krishna), the formal character and colour scheme of settings generally reflect the narrative's emotional mood (for example, vibrant, dark-blue, cloudy skies and embracing, purple-black glades evoking amorous anticipation and red grounds expressing the passions of love or war).

      Western symbolic systems, however, are more intellectually directed, their imagery having precise literary meanings and their colour codes intended primarily for narrative or devotional identification. The iconographic programs of the early Christian (Early Christian art) churches, for example, laid down complex formulas for the viewpoints, gestures, facial expressions, and positions of arms, hands, and feet for religious figures. An elaborate Ethiopian Christian (Ethiopian Orthodox church) iconographic system was followed until very recently, and elsewhere traditional methods survive of identifying archangels and saints by their attributes and by the symbols of martyrdom that they display: distinguishing white-bearded St. Peter from black-bearded St. Paul, for example, and portraying St. Catherine with a wheel and St. Bartholomew with a knife and skin. Christian iconography adopted and elaborated Greco-Roman and Jewish symbolic imagery: the pagan signs of the vine and the fish, for example, and the image of Christ as the Good Shepherd based on the Greek Hermes Kriophoros. Medieval and Renaissance writings define an immense vocabulary of symbolic images, such as the crescent, sea urchin, and owl signifying heresy, the toad and jug representing the devil, and the egg and bagpipes as erotic symbols (all of which appear in Hieronymus Bosch (Bosch, Hiëronymus)'s 15th-century narrative moralities). Angels and devils, hellfire and golden paradise, heavenly skies and birds in flight representing spirituality and rebirth are examples of the similarity of symbolic meaning for many religious, mythological, and allegorical traditions. The significance of images common to several cultures, however, may also be very different: the dragon representing avarice in European medieval allegory symbolizes friendliness in Japanese Zen painting; and the snake, symbol of temptation and eroticism in the West, signifies, by its skin shedding, the renewal of life in East Asian iconography.

Additional Reading

General reference
Both Kimberley Reynolds with Richard Seddon, Illustrated Dictionary of Art Terms (1981, reissued 1984); and Ralph Mayer, A Dictionary of Art Terms and Techniques (1969, reissued 1981), include modern art references. Two works by Harold Osborne (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Art (1970), and The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Art (1981), provide extensive bibliographies. Also see René Huyghe (general ed.), Larousse Encyclopedia of Prehistoric and Ancient Art, rev. ed. (1966, reissued 1981); Larousse Encyclopedia of Byzantine and Medieval Art, rev. ed. (1966, reissued 1981); Larousse Encyclopedia of Renaissance and Baroque Art (1964, reissued 1981); and Larousse Encyclopedia of Modern Art (1965, reissued 1981).

Design
Good surveys of the subject include Frederick Malins, Understanding Paintings: The Elements of Composition (1981); and Johannes Itten, Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus, rev. ed. (1975; originally published in German, 1963). Works on colour include Josef Albers, The Interaction of Color (1963, reissued with rev. plate section, 1975); Johannes Itten, The Art of Color (1961, reissued 1973; originally published in German, 1961); Faber Birren, Creative Color (1961), and (ed.), A Grammar of Color: A Basic Treatise on the Color System by Albert H. Munsell (1969); Robert L. Herbert, Neo-Impressionism (1968); William Innes Homer, Seurat and the Science of Painting (1964, reprinted 1978); and Barbara Rose, “The Primacy of Color,” Art International, 8:22–26 (1964). The influence of photography on painting is examined in Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (1968, reissued 1974); and Karen Tsujimoto, Images of America: Precisionist Painting and Modern Photography (1982).

Mediums
Standard works on most painting materials, supports, surfaces, and techniques include Ralph Mayer, The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques, 4th rev. ed. (1982), with extensive bibliography; Hilaire Hiler, The Painter's Pocket Book of Methods and Materials, 3rd ed. rev. by Colin Hayes (1970); Kurt Herberts, The Complete Handbook of Artist's Techniques (1958; trans. from the German); Maria Bazzi, The Artist's Methods and Materials (1960; originally published in Italian, 1956), with a bibliography of important treatises on mediums and techniques; Frederic Taubes, A Guide to Traditional and Modern Painting Methods (1963); and Max Doerner, The Materials of the Artist and Their Use in Painting, rev. ed. (1949, reprinted 1969; originally published in German, 4th ed., 1933). For discussion of tempera, see the appropriate sections in Daniel V. Thompson, The Materials of Medieval Painting (1936; reprinted as Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting, 1956). Watercolour painting is treated in Walter Koschatzky, Watercolor: History and Technique (1970; originally published in German, 1969). For treatment of ink painting, see Fei Ch'eng Wu, Brush Drawing in the Chinese Manner (1957); and Osvald Síren, Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles, 7 vol. (1973). Fred Gettings, Polymer Painting Manual (1971), is a thorough and well-illustrated guide to acrylic painting. Works on other mediums include Jean Guichard-Melli, Matisse Paper Cutouts (1984; originally published in French, 1983); and Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh, Collage, rev. ed. (1967).

Forms
William G. Archer, Indian Miniatures (1960), and Indian Paintings from the Punjab Hills: A Survey and History of Pahari Miniature Painting (1973); Mark Zebrowski, Deccani Painting (1983); Janet Woodbury Adams, Decorative Folding Screens: In the West from 1600 to the Present Day (U.S. title: Decorative Folding Screens: 400 Years in the Western World, 1982); Elise Grilli, The Art of the Japanese Screen (1971); Roselee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art, 1909 to the Present (1979); and Adrian Henri, Environments and Happenings (U.S. title: Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance, 1974).

Imagery
E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 4th ed. (1972); Gyorgy Kepes (ed.), Sign, Image, Symbol (1966); Leon M. Zolbrod, Haiku Painting (1983); Lucy R. Lippard et al., Pop Art (1960, rev. ed. 1970); and J.H. Matthews, Eight Painters: The Surrealist Context (1982).

Subject matter
Howard Daniel, Encyclopedia of Themes and Subjects in Painting (1971), a concise survey of Western mythological and religious subjects; David Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice (1982); Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983); Norman Bryson, World and Image: French Painting of the Ancient Régime (1982); Michael Levey, The Painter Depicted: Painters as a Subject in Painting (1982); John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (1966, reissued 1979), includes interpretive discussions of the works and extracts from the artists' letters; Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (1949, reissued 1975); A. Richard Turner, The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy (1966, reprinted 1974); Joseph S. Czestochowski, The American Landscape Tradition (1982); Roger Boulet, The Canadian Earth: Landscape Paintings by the Group of Seven (1982); Michael Jacobs, Nude Painting (1979); and Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (1976).

Symbolism
Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (1939, reissued 1972), and Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955, reprinted 1982); F.D.K. Bosch, The Golden Germ (1960); Carl G. Jung et al., Man and His Symbols (posthumous ed. 1964, reprinted 1979), with excellent illustrations; Rudolf Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (1977), includes Eastern imagery; Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations Through Eight Centuries (1960); George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (1954, reprinted 1973); Joan Evans, Monastic Iconography in France: From the Renaissance to the Revolution (1970); and Jitendra Nath Banerjea, The Development of Hindu Iconography, 2nd rev. ed. (1956, reprinted 1974).

Writings
Irma A. Richter (ed.), Selections from the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1952, reprinted 1977), illustrated; Giorgio Vasari, Vasari on Technique, ed. by G. Baldwin Brown, trans. by Louisa A. Maclehose (1907, reprinted 1961); The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, 1679–1701, included in Mai-mai Sze, The Tao of Painting, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1963); Elizabeth G. Holt (ed.), A Documentary History of Art, 2nd ed., 3 vol. (1957–65); John Rewald (ed.), Cézanne's Letters, 5th ed. (1982); Vincent Van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, 2nd ed., 3 vol. (1978); Fernand Léger, Functions of Painting, ed. by Edward F. Fry (1973; originally published in French, 1965); Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay, The New Art of Color, ed. by Arthur A. Cohen (1978); Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, 2nd ed. (1981); Marcel Jean (ed.), The Autobiography of Surrealism (1980); Wassily Kandinsky, Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 2 vol., ed. by Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (1982), with the original illustrations; Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook (1953, reprinted 1977; originally published in German, 1925), On Modern Art (1948, reprinted 1966; originally published in German, 1945), The Thinking Eye, ed. by Jürg Spiller (1961, reprinted 1969; originally published in German, 1956), and The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1918, ed. by Felix Klee (1964, reissued 1968; originally published in German, 1957); Marcel Duchamp, The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp: Salt Seller, ed. by Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (1975; originally published in French, 1958), and Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed. by Paul Matisse (1983); Henri Matisse, Notes of a Painter, included in Alfred H. Barr, Matisse: His Art and His Public (1951, reprinted 1966); Edward F. Fry, Cubism (1966, reprinted 1978; trans. from the French and German); Pierre Daix, Cubists and Cubism (1982; originally published in French, 1982); Pablo Picasso, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, comp. by Dore Ashton (1972); Katharine Kuh, The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (1962); and The New York School, foreword by Maurice Tuchman (1970), with an extensive bibliography.Peter D. Owen

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