The background of medieval religious paintings (those painted on wood as opposed to frescos), most usually being of gold leaf, has a particular significance. While the human or divine figures and their setting, if any, were normally painted in tempera (coloured pigments suspended in a solution made with egg), the background (lo sfondo in Italian), whether flat or, in the case of haloes, having a punched or indented pattern, was very often made of extremely fine sheets of pure gold (gold leaf). This background, once applied, was highly polished and therefore glowed with a sparkling, flickering light, especially when on an altar lit with candles.
The significance of this costly gold background was that, whatever the scene being represented, the image was imbued with a sort of 'divine' otherworldliness, a quality of being outside time, of timelessness, and in a symbolic way, separate from our normal space. Gold could also be applied to salient points or objects in a picture, for instance, an angel's wings as is the case in Beato Angelico's glittering Annunciation at Cortona.
Annunciation, 1434 by Beato Angelico (Guido di Piero, aka Fra Giovanni da Fiesole),
c.1395-1455. Tempera on panel
Museo Diocesano del Capitolo, Cortona, Italy
The photo above shows the work of an extraordinary painter, a monk, who is technically regarded as a Renaissance artist although, as this work demonstrates, Beato Angelico maintained some of the traditions of late medieval painting, in this particular case, amongst other things the use of gold leaf: around the dove above Mary's head, in the fabric covering her chair, in the stars decorating the ceiling of her apartment, in the words issuing from the mouth of the angel, in the decorative elements of his clothing and, most spectacularly, in the angel's wings. The use of gold in the haloes of sacred figures continued, as here, even as it declined as a standard background. The effect of the gold in the wings is amazing, at least for me, as, when I first saw this painting in Cortona, it was dazzling; the picture had been restored and the gold undoubtedly exerted its power on me as a viewer of this profound image. Despite having by that time seen many other paintings where gold leaf had been used, especially as the 'flat' background, its force in this case was extraordinary.
Annunciation, by Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510)
Tempera on panel, 1489-90. Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence.
By way of contrast, as the Renaissance got into full swing, a painting of the same subject, the Annunciation, made about 56 years later, has almost no gold at all and depends entirely on its suggestion of reality for its effect. Note incidentally, that here we are observers, definitely not participants (discussed later).
The function of the gold background however, apart from the, so to speak 'mechanical' one of making certain things 'precious', as in the Angelico above, was to intimate the sublime, the divine, the other world of a paradise. In the Beato Angelico work just discussed, the entire ambience of the scene is painted in great detail - which could and did happen in medieval painting, especially in manuscript illumination - with no gold background and, through Angelico's use of the then 'new' perspective techniques, is rendered physically-spatially plausible in a way unknown to medieval artists.
The Mourning over the Body of Christ by Giottino (Giotto di Stefano or Tommaso di Stefano,
1324-69). Tempera on panel, c. 1360-65
Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence
In this exquisite painting (above) by Giottino we have an example of the late medieval use of a flat gold-leaf background. Although the individual figures are convincing in their 'realism' (they are solidly modelled, they have space both as individual actors and between them), and a sense of the tragedy is evident especially (and dramatically) in the figure of Mary Magdalen in the lower right corner, the extent to which the foreground action is based on (earthly) reality is, so to say 'contradicted' by the flat gold background. As if to say, yes, we are dealing with a human tragedy but one which at the same time is taken into the sublime world of divinity. A reminder here that, as twenty-first century viewers of medieval artwork we need to keep in mind not only the much-changed attitudes concerning religious devotion and belief, but also that, as with so many works of this age, the effect of the gold has diminished considerably and the colours used in the figures have also undergone various changes. In other words, this picture does not look as it did when it left its maker's workshop and its present collocation, in an art gallery, is not that for which it was made.
But it has occurred to me (as perhaps to others) that, with the various changes in subsequent periods of art history - as we have already seen, by the time Botticelli was working, gold leaf had almost entirely disappeared from 'modern' painting - ultimately, we may say, a 'substitute' was found. Throughout the Renaissance proper the aim was to make one's images resemble as near as possible observable reality, what was referred to as Nature, a concept which referred as much to human bodies as to anything else 'natural'; Nature, under the stimulus of Greco-Roman art, was seen as the perfect model, even if, in fact, Nature idealised was often the ultimate result. Until that point, much religious art was produced by repeating given 'types' even if an artist's individual personality was still discernible; with the advent of the Renaissance, Nature and the Greco-Roman past became the guides for and the aspirations of contemporary artists. So Nature itself, that is, the landscape, differing weather and light conditions, rivers, the pastoral life and so on were all included in the images contrived by those artists, both painters and sculptors. And, incidentally, the personality of the artist actually became much more obvious, seemingly, at least in part, as a by-product of their 'liberated-scientific' observation of Nature (both landscape and the human figure).
Slowly then, the divine - and the sublime - were conveyed in painting by means other than by a gold background; this is perhaps most easily seen in the study of nature (independently of the human figure) in Venetian painting where the landscape and effects of light, particularly the twilight, introduced a readily appreciated 'poetical' element understood as mirroring the divine. But following these developments, Italian art arrived at the period known as the Baroque, a period and a style which also followed great upheaval in the Catholic Church, upheaval which required a different attitude in art.
Sacred and Profane Love, c.1515 by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, 1488-90 - 1576)
Oil on canvas. Galleria Borghese, Rome
This painting is a good example of what is stated above concerning the 'poetry' of the twilight landscape; as well, note the position of the 'subject' in relation to the viewer of the picture: we are observers, not participants. This is a relatively early Titian compared with his image below.
Baroque painting made no use of gold even if individual pictures, especially in churches and religious houses, might be framed in various materials, including gold; but gold was not used as an expressive element in the paintings themselves. However something else was: black. As a result of political and religious changes and requirements, deep emotional expression became a hallmark of the religious painting of the period; Caravaggio, bringing a kind of synthesis of earlier masters along with his own artistic temperament, gave this period a cue as to how to express the new attitudes of the Church. One important change was that the subject of a given image might be placed so close to the viewer that he or she became a quasi participant in the event portrayed; not merely or usually an outside observer, as with most Renaissance work. Parts of bodies seemed to protrude into the 'real' space of the people looking at these pictures; in the case of sculpture, figures almost stepped out of their frames (The Death of Saint Cecilia by Antonio Raggi, in Sant'Agnese in Agone, Rome) or were suspended into our shared space (Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Therese in Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome).
The Death of Santa Cecilia by Antonio Raggi (1624-86), high-relief marble sculpture.
The church of Sant'Agnese in Agone, Rome.
As we can easily see, the figures on either side of this wonderful work overlap the frame of the scene and 'exist' in our space, the real space of this beautiful church situated in the Piazza Navona. The high relief of those two figures in particular projects this event further into 'our' space. Obviously, no dark background here but the proximity of the foreground sculpted actors to their viewers (us) is marked.
Venus blindfolding Cupid, c.1560 by Titian
Oil on canvas. Galleria Borghese, Rome
This picture by Titian, painted about 45 years later than his work above, exemplifies the tendency to bring the actors in the narrative very close to the viewer; here we see half-figures, not full figures, suggesting that we are virtually participants in the action, not merely observers of it.
And the background in paintings, no longer the gold of preceding ages, was dark, very dark tending to black. A black which often ate-up the background, consumed the ambient space in anonymous darkness out of which figures emerged as though being drawn into life out of a nebulous nothingness. No longer the clear brilliance of light-reflecting precious metal, no longer the sheer symbolic splendour of sublime divinity; rather, the abstraction of an ill-defined, mysterious ambivalence - sometimes a 'space', often a void. The actors thrown into 'our' space, into our reality; bodies no longer simply admired or pitied, now so close as to be touched. The emotionally neutral gold, replaced first by the natural world of the Renaissance, is now superseded by an active presence in the background of many pictures, a (possibly malevolent) darkness enveloping time and space to sharpen and deepen our emotional response while simultaneously being part of our world; and reflecting not a divine light but perhaps the incomprehensibility of the divine together with the dark spaces of our inner life. In other words, from the change in focus begun in the Renaissance - a focus on Man as creator and discerner - , artists gradually incorporated more of Man even into their religious images, that is, a perception of Man (and his psychological life) as a deliberate actor and not merely subject to the divine.
Mary Magdalen contemplating Death by Domenico Fetti (1589 - 1623)
Oil on canvas. Galleria Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, Rome.
We might remind ourselves at this point that half-figures and dark backgrounds were not 'invented' in the Baroque period but we can say that these elements and others were brought together at that time to serve particular purposes. Nor were all paintings as dark as late Caravaggio and many did in fact have some kind of setting, usually architectural. But the proximity to the viewer of one or more actors in a religious drama was very common, even in pictures where there are full figures. The use of dark shadows, strengthening the modelling of both figures and clothing, was however ubiquitous during the Baroque. We should also remember that the extreme darkness utilised in oil paintings on canvas was not technically possible in fresco which means that in certain places, churches and convents mostly, the discrepancy in tone between Baroque frescos and Baroque oil pictures is marked. The small painting above by Fetti is a good example of several Baroque tendencies, especially the fact that the 'background' in a sense 'absorbs' the figure, enwraps it rather than 'staying put' so to speak, in the actual background, in the space behind the figure. The saint's book and elbow particularly are very close to us, the viewers, as are her left hand and the skull she holds in it. Here Fetti has allowed the strong contrasting light to fall mainly on Magdalen's face and right arm and the book it rests on.
Here I would once again remind readers that my observations are those of a painter and not those of a trained art historian. My interest is, for the most part, in the ways painters and sculptors worked, the way they saw things and how that changed, and the way they dealt with (mainly) religious imagery. Allowing for the vast diversity of artistic expression, that is to say, that while discussing certain trends in the continuous movement of art, we need to keep in mind the fact that beside the major schools and periods of art history there were always those artists working on the fringes, those who worked in somewhat older styles and those who were virtually unique in their expression. In the specific case here under discussion, that there is a discernible trend or propensity in Baroque oil painting to favour dark, often enveloping backgrounds, without doubt there are many instances, even in oil pictures (as opposed to the fresco technique), where the same artists and others did not use a dark background, and we will conclude with just such an image, painted by the Spanish-by-birth but Neapolitan-by-choice artist, Jusepe de Ribera.
Saint Januarius (Gennaro) emerges unscathed from the Furnace, 1646 by Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652). Cappella del Tesoro in the Cathedral of Naples
As is obvious, this large masterwork is not in any sense particularly dark and certainly does not have a dark background, on the contrary; in fact the sky-blue background in this painting is actually at odds with the bulk of the Spanish master's output, often concerning ageing hermit saints immersed in or emerging from a near black background.
All photographs were taken by the author who reserves copyright.
