The Joy of Experimenting with Traditional Techniques

Graduating to Sheepskin

Only in Florence. Zecchi, on the via dello Studio, is one of the world’s great art supply shops. Not necessarily because of the quantity of goods on display (it’s actually rather small, just one room), but for the quality of the traditional media available and the knowledge of the proprietors. Having supplied the raw material for generations of artists working in traditional media like egg tempera and fresco (I’ve bought my pigments for fresco here since I studied with maestro Leonetto Tintori in 1989), they’ve taken to packaging their own paints in egg tempera and oil, along with all the exotic ingredients for working in traditional media. Stopping in a couple of weeks ago, and having had for a while an interest in experimenting with the gouache on vellum (sheepskin) techniques of 18^th century artists like Marco Ricci, I asked for a sheet of pergamena (sheepskin or vellum), and was conducted (for the first time in my experience) to a back storeroom where they stored, among many, many other things, a roll of sheepskins—yes, the skins of sheep, laid out looking like the headless and legless bodies of sheep. I learned that pergamena was treated in a way that tended to make the top surface water-resistant, so for the watermedia I intended to use I needed to treat it with ox gall (fiele di bue), the bile of an ox’s gallbladder; Zecchi sells it under their own label. To some this bilious media might be old news, but for me it had the ring of the ancient and exotic about it. I learned later (online) that it had some interesting properties for watercolor painting; its role with sheepskin is to make the surface able to accept or bond watermedia like gouache.

What actually spurred this interest in gouache on vellum was an elegant little bronze frame I’d bought months earlier in Florence at the remarkable shop of Duccio Banchi on the via del Serraglio in the Oltrarno. Father and son still make these refined bronze frames and decorative objects, and the one I’d purchased seemed to call for something appropriately delicate and classical. I worked out a series of subjects based on 18^th century capricci, in monochrome, and gave them my own spin by treating the scenes as narratives, of a kind (I’ll leave it to you to read them). Letting a bit of the vellum read through gives the grisailles a warm aspect. The images here show the process from the raw sheepskin to a smaller section prepared with ox gall to the painting of the scenes, Diana at Her Bath and Hercules at the Crossroads.

arts and crafts

The Artist and the Artisan

Cathedral, Civita Castellana (Lazio)

OK, so there’s the Romantic idea of the humble artisan toiling away anonymously for love of God and his craft. And then there’s reality: the Cosmati father and son who proudly signed their names in the architrave over the portico of the cathedral in Civita Castellana; the artisans who were, historically, just as likely to work for private patrons as the Church—think of wedding chests, picture frames, painted tiles, etc.; and as for craft, the distinction between art and craft is a modern construct that does just as much violence to the nature of craft as it does to art. At the level of the material object, there is no inevitable difference between art and craft in pre-Modern culture; what, perhaps, separates them is the intentionality, the conceptual idea and/or the meaning that is intended in the work. While the craftsman might or might not be knowing in what he does and how he decides to do it—he might be either an advancer of a traditional skill or he may simply be its continuer—the artist is expected, required even, to know how and why he does what he does. So, some (of course not all) craftspeople know exactly how and why they do what they do, and may be quite articulate about it; and they may also invest their work with meaning, a poetic intent that transcends mere form. Naturally not every picture frame needs to be meaningful, but an artisan who is conscious of the decorum a frame requires does indeed contribute to the contextualization, and therefore a part of the meaning, of the picture.
Witness the marvelous Florentine carver Carlo Puccini (http://woodcarving.altervista.org/?lang=eng); from a family of architects, his chosen artistic metier is carving in wood, something he does with a bravura freehand style, investing often complex baroque forms with a lively touch, and a bit of a rustic (“rustic” in the sense of the Baroque music of Corelli) edge. Carlo knows exactly what he’s doing when he makes a frame (see the quote from Frank Zappa at the head of his website—for the rest of the quote go here). Many of his clients are looking for copies of furniture, frames, etc., sometimes translated from other media (like stone or stucco); some, like me, present him with a design (for the frame holding my painting of Diogenes and Alexander, next to Carlo in the photo). He is also capable of invention, although it is the nature of most folks who want something new-traditional that they’re not prepared to take risks. I don’t want to Romanticize what is, in this modern world, a challenging life, but Carlo is an absolutely lovely human being as well as artist, and I attribute some of that to the satisfaction he gets from his work (of course, his work gives him satisfaction in part because he is a lovely human being). And, while not as aggressively self-promotional as the Cosmati, neither is he anonymous: he works on the ground floor in via Ghibellina, just up the street from the Casa Buonarotti, so he is “on show” to passersby.

Carlo Puccini in his shop in Florence

He is by no means alone in a country that still, despite the best efforts of our culture to kill them, is filled with active, talented, youngish (diversamente giovane), and knowledgeable masters of carving, painting, plastering, and intarsia—the latter perhaps best represented by the phenomenally able, and charming, Daniele Parasecolo in Todi: http://www.woodinlaysitaly.com/. These modern masters have to be smarter, more alert and articulate than their predecessors, partly in order to defend what they do. If these folks survive, it is because they are actively engaged in their craft; which means it is practically an obligation for those of us who love what they do to give them every opportunity to practice their art.