Turner & 'meglip'
January 10 2017
Picture: National Gallery
I've always been fascinated by how advances in artistic materials have driven creative change. Our view of art history tends to be, for example, that at various points in history great artists ushered in a creative revolution that drove forward the next chapter in painting; Titian and 'colore' in Venice, or Monet and impressionism in France.
I'm simplifying, and I certainly don't doubt the place of individual artistic genius in the evolution of art. But just as significant, sometimes, can be the technical development of artist's materials. Titian and his Venetian colleagues would likely not have developed the 'colore' style - based more on broader brushwork and less reliant on drawing (or 'disegno') - had they not been obliged by Venice's damp and watery environment to paint increasingly on canvas (in abundant supply, thanks to all those sailing ships) rather than fresco and panel. They also had the benefit of vibrant new pigments which, due to Venice's pre-eminence as a trading port, came from faraway places such as Afghanistan. Similarly, the fact that by the later 19th Century paint manufacturers had figured out how to put ready-mized paint in durable tubes, thus increasing its portability, greatly benefited the impressionists.
Anyway, the point of all this is to point you to some new research published in a chemistry journal, Angewandte Chemie (and summarised here at Science Daily) which has discovered more about the drying agents used by artists such as Turner in the 19th Century. 'Megilp', or 'gumtion', made oil paint dry more quickly than before and allowed artists to use extra layers of colours and glazes more rapidly, and more spontaneously. The new research just published has discovered how these admixtures actually worked:
The researchers combined several spectroscopic techniques to explore the gels on multiple scales. They managed to define the molecular interactions of the hybrid organic-inorganic gel system and the mechanisms of gelling. The team uncovered processes similar to those behind the drying and aging of oils. Lead is known to accelerate these processes, which explains the formation of the gel. These findings show that lead not only catalyzes the gelling process but contributes to the structure of the medium.
Regular followers of the recent Old Master fake scandal will recall that lead-based drying agents are also added to forgeries to help make the oil paint dry faster. In this case, the rapid drying is not to help the forgers paint better, but to make the paint look older.
Update - it's Megilp, not Meglip, as I put it in the title.
