Adriano Zecchina
Alchimie nell'arte.
La chimica e l'evoluzione della pittura
Isbn 9788808199058
Why did Titian not paint with the yellow of van Gogh? What is the relation between colours and chemistry? What is the tie between art and science?
The literature on colours is endless. A place is deserved also by Alchimie nell’arte (Alchemy in art) by Adriano Zecchina, an extraordinarily pleasant popular science book, written by a chemist with a passion for painting. Yes, also art has a link to chemistry. A tragedy for those who (like me) understands nothing about it; but it is a fortune to read this book and understand that art history can be read also by looking at how artists used available technologies to paint their pictures. And when it comes to technology, we are talking essentially of colours.
There are some basic concepts to be invoked: first, white light produced by the sun is actually made up of the colours of the rainbow, which are emitted on different wavelengths. White light can be decomposed (the classic example of the rainbow is known to anyone). There are tiny substances (pigments, in turn either natural or artificial, that is created by man) which absorb certain wavelengths in the range of colours of the iris and that return outside a colour complementary to it. A pigment that absorbs for instance the extreme part of the red spreads its complementary colour, or violet. That's it. To want to be prosaic, art history is only a matter of pigments, absorption and scattering of light.
Yet - and fortunately - the world of colour is an absolutely fascinating world; and at the end I think this is the main merit of Zecchina’s work: explaining things with passion; guiding us in the examination of the pigments available to the human being from prehistory to the present day, on the one hand still with the wonder of the child, and on the other with the amusement of someone knowing what is behind it. If we were at a rock concert, we would be the audience of the concert, but Zecchina would allow us to take a look at the backstage.
It is so, for example, that we learn that the range of pigments has been relatively small for millennia, and that their real surge (in historical perspective) came with the birth of modern chemistry, between 1750 and 1850, with the synthesis of artificial inorganic pigments (who never heard of Prussian blue?). Then, with the arrival of the pigments of an organic nature, in the late nineteenth century, the range of colours is grown at least five times; and became endless later on with digital art, where, however, no reference is made any more to pigments (and brushes), but to the world of pixels.
With the industrial revolution thus art becomes democratic, in the sense that it becomes accessible to everyone both in terms of production costs and of potential customers. The tin tubes that contain colours (i.e. pigments already mixed with linseed oil) were introduced in 1840. Before, colours had been produced by hand and used very sparingly. Who among us has never heard, in front of a modern painting, that the painting of an artist is much material? Beyond the technical aspects, Giotto would never have dreamed - for his Scrovegni Chapel - of applying dense layers of the ultramarine blue, which originated from Afghanistan and was expensive as gold. And yet the decoration of the Chapel was a very expensive undertaking, not coincidentally funded by a family of loan sharks, who wanted to get ahead in acquiring a favourable treatment at the time of the Trial before the Lord.
Of course the artists knew nothing of the chemical properties of the pigments: the human kind began painting (one painting himself or herself) on a purely empirical pattern; the range of pigments, as well as the processing of the same, and the techniques of the work (fresco, encaustic painting, niello, tempera, oil) have always encompassed a mass of information (real secrets) jealously guarded and handed down mostly orally, in artisan workshops. The (mainly medieval) texts that delivered real recipes for colours are very rare and very valuable. Very often these compilations proceed by successive layers; i.e. somebody started with an initial set of requirements and the other recipes were added gradually. These texts (with a few exceptions) passed from generation to generation, from workshop to workshop.
We are in the realm of alchemy (understanding de facto alchemy as what was done as before modern chemistry). It is absolutely logical that this world also grows on magical and esoteric aspects. If a man - on the basis of pure experience, and knowing nothing of chemistry - is able, for example, to extract mercury from cinnabar, there is nothing to stop him getting to hunt the Philosopher's Stone.
Among the texts known to us which better display the state of the craft there are without any doubt two standing out among all: the De diversis artibus of Theophilus monaco (found at the end of the eighteenth century, compiled in the North- European area, probably in the eleventh century; very curiously, this text has been translated into Italian only once in 2000 by Adriano Caffaro , and thanks to a tiny publishing house of Salerno) and the Libro dell’Arte (Book of the Art) by Cennino Cennini, to which (of course) makes extensive reference also Zecchina. How much the Book of the Art by Cennino Cennini (end of 1300) has been important in the artistic field, starting with the publication of the first edition in 1821 is something of which you can have an immediate perception examining the dozens of issues that have been published around the world.
The reason is simple: to be interested were not only historians of science, but artists themselves (especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries throughout Europe movements developed such as the Art Nouveau and the Secession aiming at recovering a more spiritual dimension of art, also through the recovery of medieval techniques); and, again, extremely interested were of course restorers as well art theorists, the latter seeking to understand the technical vocabulary used by Cennino at the moment of transition from the Middle Ages to Humanism .
The world of those moving around colour is really fascinating, and absolutely full of unexpected links and eye-popping figures. We will cite here only a few: in his book Zecchina speaks to us of the famous forger Icilio Federico Joni (a non-trivial merit of the work: the analytical index and the one of colours allow us to move easily between the pages); and of course everyone would think of someone conducting a criminal and illegal activity; however, in fact Joni was quite famous, enjoying respect and unconditional friendships: the American billionaire Forbes (fond of history of art techniques and with a private laboratory which he later donated to the Yale University, making of it one of the main centres of the study on the tempera technique) had sent his most brilliant students to Federico Joni to discover the profession tricks: among these was Daniel Thompson, whom Zecchina cites on p. 82 .
But the study of artistic techniques is also a way to free ourselves from the stereotypical and reactionary image of the woman in Victorian England in mid-800. To publish the Bologna manuscript that Zecchina always mentions on p.82 is Mary Philadelphia Merrifield, the author of the famous Original Treatises on the Arts of Painting, a mother of five children, initially without any special knowledge in high society, but with a boundless passion for science and pigments. This woman, simply relying on her talent, will travel throughout Europe and will bring two of her five children with her to translate the manuscripts as was discovering. Peculiar? Absolutely yes. Even more so when you consider that the one translating into the first English drafts the Bologna manuscript was Charles, who was then 18 years old. It could have been even more peculiar: the other son (Frederick) translated from the Spanish and he was 14 years old.
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