IMPASTO: The technique of applying thick layers or strokes of oil paint, so that they stand out from the surface of a canvas or paneclass="underline" also called “loaded brush.” Such seventeenth-century painters as Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Frans Hals used impasto to emphasize pictorial highlights; in the nineteenth century, Manet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and others used it more extensively for texture and variety. Some modern painters, including de Kooning and Dubuffet, took to laying the paint on with a palette knife or simply squeezing it directly from the tube. (One does not, it should be clear, create impasto with water colors.)
Impasto: Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait
MORBIDEZZA (MOR-buh-DETZ-uh): Literally, “softness,” “tenderness.” Used to describe the soft blending of tones in painting—by Correggio, for instance— or rounding of edges in sculpture, especially in the rendering of human flesh. On a bad day, could seem to degenerate into effeminacy and sickliness.
PENTIMENTO: A painter’s term (and Lillian Hellman’s) derived from the Italian word for “repentance,” and referring to the evidence that an artist changed his mind, or made a mistake, and tried to conceal it by painting over it. As time goes by, the top layer of paint may become transparent, and the artist’s original statement begins to show through. Pentimento can often be found in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, in which the artists commonly used thin layers of paint to obliterate an element of a composition— one of the children, say, in an interior— only to have its ghost reappear behind a lady’s dress or a piece of furniture a couple hundred years later. One of the most famous examples of pentimento is the double hat brim in Rembrandt’s portrait Flora.
Pentimento: Rembrandt’s Flora
PUTTO (POO-toe): Putti (note the plural) are those naked, chubby babies that cavort through Italian paintings, especially from the fifteenth century on. “Putto” means “little boy” in Italian, and originally the figure was derived from personifications of Eros in early Greek and Roman art; by extension, the term came to apply to any naked child in a painting. Putti were very popular in Renaissance and Baroque paintings, where they stood for anything from Cupid, to the pagan attendants of a god or goddess, to cherubim celebrating the Madonna and child.
QUATTROCENTO; CINQUECENTO (KWA-tro-CHEN-toe; CHINGK-weh-CHEN-toe): Literally, “the four hundred” and “the five hundred”; to art buffs, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, respectively. In other words, the Early and the High Renaissances.
Putti in Veronese’s Mars and Venus United by Love
SFUMATO (sfoo-MAH-toe): Comes from the Italian word for “smoke” and describes a method of fusing areas of color or tone to create a soft, hazy, atmospheric effect, not unlike the soft focus in old Hollywood movies. Sfumato is most often mentioned in connection with Leonardo and his followers.
SOTTO IN SU (soh-toe-in-SOO): This one is good for a few brownie points; it means, approximately, “under on up,” and describes the trick of painting figures in perspective on a ceiling so that they are extremely foreshortened, giving the impression, when viewed from directly underneath, that they’re floating high overhead instead of lying flat in a picture plane. Sotto in su was especially popular in Italy during the Baroque and Rococo periods (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), when lots of people were painting ceilings and trying to create elaborate visual illusions. The names to drop: Tiepolo, Correggio, Mantegna.
VEDUTA (veh-DOO-tah): Means “view”; in this case, a detailed, graphic, and more or less factual view of a town, city, or landscape. Vedute (note the plural) were in vogue during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the artists who painted, drew, or etched them were known as vedutisti. A variation of the veduta was the veduta ideata (“idealized”), in which the realistic elements were juxtaposed in such a way as to produce a scene that was positively bizarre (e.g., Canaletto’s drawing of St. Peter’s in Rome rising above the Doge’s Palace in Venice). The vedutisti to remember: Canaletto, the Guardi family, Piranesi.
Six isms, One ijl, and Dada
Be grateful we edited out Orphism, Vorticism, Suprematism, and the Scuola Metafisica at the last minute. FAUVISM
Henri Matisse, Blue Nude (1907)
Headquarters:
Paris and the South of France.
Life Span:
1905–1908.
Quote:
“Donatello chez les fauves!” (“Donatello among the wild beasts!”), uttered at the Salon d’Automne by an anonymous art critic upon catching sight of an old-fashioned Italianate bust in a roomful of Matisses.
Central Figures:
Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, all painters.
Spiritual Fathers:
Paul Gauguin, Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau.
Salient Features:
Raw, vibrant-to-strident color within bold black outlines; moderately distorted perspective; an assault on the Frenchman’s traditional love of order and harmony that today reads as both joyous and elegant; healthiest metabolism this side of soft-drink commercials.
Keepers of the Flame:
None (though Matisse is a big, and ongoing, influence on everybody). EXPRESSIONISM
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Dresden (1908)
Wassily Kandinsky, Black Lines (1913)
Headquarters:
Germany.
Life Span:
1905–1920s.
Quotes:
“He who renders his inner convictions as he knows he must, and does so with spontaneity and sincerity, is one of us.”—Ernst Kirchner.
“Something like a necktie or a carpet.”—Wassily Kandinsky, of what he feared abstract art might degenerate into.
Central Figures:
In Dresden (in “The Bridge”): Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, painters. In Munich (in “The Blue Rider”): Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, painters. Under the banner “New Objectivity”: George Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, painters. Confrères and honorary members: Arnold Schoenberg, composer; Bertolt Brecht, dramatist; Franz Kafka, writer.
Spiritual Fathers:
Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Salient Features:
A tendency to let it all—pathos, violence, morbidity, rage—hang out; distortion, fragmentation, Gothic angularity, and lots of deliberately crude woodcuts; the determination to shake the viewer up and to declare Germany’s artistic independence from France. Down in Munich, under Kandinsky—a Russian with a tendency to sound like a scout for a California religious cult—abstraction, and a bit less morbidity
Keepers of the Flame:
The abstract expressionists of the Forties and Fifties, the neo-expressionists of the Eighties, and a barrioful of graffiti artists. CUBISM
Georges Braque, Soda (1911)
Headquarters:
Paris.
Life Span:
1907–1920s.
Quote:
Anonymous tasteful lady to Pablo Picasso: “Since you can draw so beautifully, why do you spend your time making those queer things?” Picasso: “That’s why.”
Central Figures:
Picasso, of course, and Georges Braque. Also, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger, all painters. Guillaume Apollinaire, poet.