(jazz music) Dr. Zucker: Drawing or color,
which is most important? Dr. Harris: This was a
burning question for artists and art critics in the 16th century. Dr. Zucker: And helped
to divine the styles of entire city states. Dr. Harris: We're here
in the Academia in Venice looking at Bellini's Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist and Saint. Looking at this painting, I would say Bellini would have said that
color was more important. The reds and the blues
and the greens just glow. Dr. Zucker: They're spectacular
and that's of course because Bellini is using a new technique which had been perfected in the north, known as glazing. Dr. Harris: That's right. Taking their cue from the artists of the northern Renaissance,
artists like Jan Van Eyck, and the way that they painted
was to apply oil paint on a white ground in layers
or what artists called glazes. You would paint a thin layer of color, the oil would dry, and you
would paint another thin layer and each of these layers were translucent and reflected the white ground underneath, creating intensity and depth to the color that was unprecedented in
Italian painting before this where tempera and fresco
were the main media that artists used. Dr. Zucker: Oil was so different. Not only did it allow for
glazing, but it also stayed wet and that meant that you
could rework the surface. Tempera dries very quickly and of course, fresco is staining a patch
of wet plaster and also has to be done quite quickly
and cannot be reworked. Dr. Harris: Tempera is opaque. In other words you can't see through it. That, plus the fact that
it dries quickly, meant that when an artist wanted
to show the modeling of form, the movement from light to dark, they had to use lines, a
kind of hatching technique. Dr. Zucker: And oil allows
for the very soft modulation of light and shadow. Look, for instance, at the
Christ child's left leg. The light moves from a
brilliance at the knee that helps it project forward,
to the shadows of the top of the thigh that help
it move back in space. Dr. Harris: This is
because oil paint stays wet and it can be blended. It's an oily substance. Dr. Zucker: The Venetians
essentially gave up fresco in the late 15th century
because Venice is a series of islands and it was really
a bad atmosphere for fresco. So you have this division between the Florentine tradition
and the Venetian tradition. Dr. Harris: Right, the
Florentine tradition is one where drawing is the most important. That is line, not color. That has to do, in part,
with the Florentine interest in fresco. In a fresco painting,
you need a final drawing, because fresco dries
quickly and you need to know what you're going to do
before you start painting. What happens in the 1500s
is that this early technique of glazing that we see in
the art of Bellini changes when we look at Titian and
Veronese and Tintoretto later in the 1500s and they
really exploit what oil can do and the way that oil can allow
for a very different kind of process. Dr. Zucker: That process
allows artists to change things on the fly, freeing them from being slaves to the original drawings. A good example of that
might be Giorgione's Tempest where we know that the figure on the left was once a seated female figure. Dr. Harris: And this idea
of the artistic process on the canvas itself. Dr. Zucker: Directly on the canvas. Dr. Harris: And working out your ideas, having them evolve
right in that same place where the finished
painting will eventually be is something that's unique to
the possibilities of oil paint and something really exploited
by the artist Titian. Let's go have a look at
a late painting by Titian where we can really see
this different approach to oil paint. (jazz music)