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to begin work. All of this was in order to prevent the dust from getting into his painting. These meticulous preparations which seem exaggerated to us today were necessary in the case of paintings of such refinement. So minute were some of the details, such as the lace of a collar or a handkerchief, that the painters sometimes made use of a needle to engrave the design in the wet impasto. To be able to produce such works successfully, these masters had need of a medium of absolute precision and of great brilliance. For his style of painting, Rubens had required a medium adaptable to large, decorative paintings. The "Little Masters" used the same medium but, in applying it to their small paintings, they found it better to remove the wax. Thus they possessed an equally elegant tool, but one that was more "precious." Except for this removal of the wax, the technique remained strictly the same as that of the master of Antwerp. The colors were ground in the black oil and diluted with the mastic jelly. Rubens' laws of the transparence and opacity of the material were strictly observed.These masters, working alone in their studios, had no schools and when the last of them died, the secret of their marvellous method disappeared. This is how it is that, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, we find no further trace of the astonishing technique that had been the basis of so many masterpieces. |