- Related Topics:
- Painting
- egg-tempera painting
Tempera painting
-
What is tempera painting?
Tempera painting is an ancient technique using pigments mixed with a water-miscible medium, like egg yolk. The term tempera comes from the word "temper," meaning "to bring to a desired consistency". This method involves mixing dry pigments with a binding and adhesive vehicle.
Historically, tempera was used in Egypt, Babylonia, and ancient Greece and was the primary mural medium. It was applied to diverse surfaces, such as stone, wood panels, and vellum. Tempera was eventually superseded by oil paints during the Renaissance in Europe. However, the 20th century saw a revival of tempera by artists such as Ben Shahn, Andrew Wyeth, and Lucian Freud.
2 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
What materials are used to make tempera paint?
Tempera paint is created using pigments that are ground and mixed with a water-miscible medium. The term "tempera" comes from the word "temper," meaning "to bring to a desired consistency". True tempera is made with fresh egg yolk, though other emulsions like casein glue with linseed oil have also been used.
Traditional tempera painting involves applying colors in successive washes with sable brushes on smooth surfaces prepared with gesso. The luminous gesso base, combined with overlaid color washes, creates depth and color intensity.
2 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
How is tempera paint different from oil or watercolor paint?
Tempera, oil, and watercolor paints differ primarily in their binding agents and application techniques. Tempera uses a water-miscible medium, traditionally egg yolk, resulting in a durable, fast-drying paint that creates a luminous effect through thin, transparent layers. Oil paints, on the other hand, use refined linseed oil, allowing for slow drying, subtle tonal gradations, and the blending of colors on the canvas. Watercolor employs pigment ground in gum arabic and applied with water, known for its transparency, freshness, and the use of the white paper to create highlights, contrasting with the building-up approach of opaque paints.
3 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
How do artists create images with tempera paint?
Artists create images with tempera paint by mixing dry pigment with a water-miscible medium, such as egg yolk, to bind and adhere it to a surface. The traditional process involves applying the paint to smooth surfaces like wood, stone, paper or canvas prepared with gesso, a mixture of plaster and size.
The design is often transferred using a perforated paper cartoon, and colors are applied in thin, transparent washes with sable brushes. This method allows for a unique depth and intensity of color because of the cumulative effect of the overlaid color washes and the luminous gesso base. Effects of shading are obtained through crosshatching. Once dry, tempera paint forms a durable, protective layer, known for its steely lines, crisp edges, and meticulous detail.
2 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
What subjects were often painted using tempera in history?
Tempera painting, employing pigments mixed with a water-miscible medium, has a rich history across various cultures. It was used to decorate early Christian catacombs and served as the original mural medium in ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Mycenaean Greece, and China.
Medieval illuminated manuscripts, Byzantine icons, and altarpieces were also created using tempera on supports ranging from stone stelae and mummy cases to wood panels and vellum leaves. Italian artists like Duccio di Buoninsegna and Giotto developed the great tradition of tempera painting in the 13th and 14th centuries.
2 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
Why did tempera painting become less common after the Renaissance?
After the Renaissance, oil painting gradually superseded tempera in Europe. The rise of oil paint coincided with the changing requirements of the Renaissance and improvements in refining linseed oil and the availability of volatile solvents after 1400. Though the origins of oil painting date to the 7th century, it wasn't until the 15th century that it began to mix with tempera techniques.
3 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.
Tempera painting, painting executed with pigment ground in a water-miscible medium. The word tempera originally came from the verb temper, “to bring to a desired consistency.” Dry pigments are made usable by “tempering” them with a binding and adhesive vehicle. Such painting was distinguished from fresco painting, the colours for which contained no binder. Eventually, after the rise of oil painting, the word gained its present meaning.
Tempera is an ancient medium, having been in constant use in most of the world’s cultures until it was gradually superseded by oil paints in Europe, during the Renaissance. Tempera was the original mural medium in the ancient dynasties of Egypt, Babylonia, Mycenaean Greece, and China and was used to decorate the early Christian catacombs. It was employed on a variety of supports, from the stone stelae (or commemorative pillars), mummy cases, and papyrus rolls of ancient Egypt to the wood panels of Byzantine icons and altarpieces and the vellum leaves of medieval illuminated manuscripts.
True tempera is made by mixture with the yolk of fresh eggs, although manuscript illuminators often used egg white and some easel painters added the whole egg. Other emulsions—such as casein glue with linseed oil, egg yolk with gum and linseed oil, and egg white with linseed or poppy oil—have also been used. Individual painters have experimented with other recipes, but few of those have proved successful; all but William Blake’s later tempera paintings on copper sheets, for instance, have darkened and decayed, and it is thought that he mixed his pigment with carpenter’s glue.
" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">
Distemper is a crude form of tempera made by mixing dry pigment into a paste with water, which is thinned with heated glue in working or by adding pigment to whiting (a mixture of fine-ground chalk and size). It is used for stage scenery and full-size preparatory cartoons for murals and tapestries. When dry, its colours have the pale, matte, powdery quality of pastels, with a similar tendency to smudge. Indeed, damaged cartoons have been retouched with pastel chalks.
Egg tempera is the most-durable form of the medium, being generally unaffected by humidity and temperature. It dries quickly to form a tough film that acts as a protective skin to the support. In handling, in its diversity of transparent and opaque effects, and in the satin sheen of its finish, it resembles the modern acrylic resin emulsion paints.
Traditional tempera painting is a lengthy process. Its supports are smooth surfaces, such as planed wood, fine set plaster, stone, paper, vellum, canvas, and modern composition boards of compressed wood or paper. Linen is generally glued to the surface of panel supports, additional strips masking the seams between braced wood planks. Gesso, a mixture of plaster of paris (or gypsum) with size, is the traditional ground. The first layer is of gesso grosso, a mixture of coarse unslaked plaster and size. That provides a rough absorbent surface for 10 or more thin coats of gesso sottile, a smooth mixture of size and fine plaster previously slaked in water to retard drying. This laborious preparation results in an opaque, brilliant white, light-reflecting surface similar in texture to hard flat icing sugar.
The design for a large tempera painting was traditionally executed in distemper on a thick paper cartoon. The outlines were pricked with a perforating wheel so that when the cartoon was laid on the surface of the support, the linear pattern was transferred by dabbing, or “pouncing,” the perforations with a muslin bag of powdered charcoal. The dotted contours traced through were then fixed in paint. Medieval tempera painters of panels and manuscripts made lavish use of gold leaf on backgrounds and for symbolic features, such as haloes and beams of heavenly light. Areas of the pounced design intended for gilding were first built up into low relief with gesso duro, the harder, less-absorbent gesso compound also used for elaborate frame moldings. Background fields were often textured by impressing the gesso duro, before it set, with small, carved, intaglio wood blocks to create raised, pimpled, and quilted repeat patterns that glittered when gilded. Leaves of finely beaten gold were pressed onto a tacky mordant (adhesive compound) or over wet bole (reddish brown earth pigment) that gave greater warmth and depth when the gilded areas were burnished.
The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.
SUBSCRIBE
Colours were applied with sable brushes in successive broad sweeps or washes of semitransparent tempera. Those dried quickly, preventing the subtle tonal gradations possible with watercolour washes or oil paint; effects of shaded modelling therefore had to be obtained by a crosshatching technique of fine brush strokes. According to the Italian painter Cennino Cennini, the early Renaissance tempera painters laid the colour washes across a fully modelled monochrome underpainting in terre vert (olive-green pigment), a method later developed into the mixed mediums technique of tempera underpainting followed by transparent oil glazes.
The luminous gesso base of a tempera painting, combined with the cumulative effect of overlaid colour washes, produces a unique depth and intensity of colour. Tempera paints dry lighter in value, but their original tonality can be restored by subsequent waxing or varnishing. Other characteristic qualities of a tempera painting, resulting from its fast-drying property and disciplined technique, are its steely lines and crisp edges, its meticulous detail and rich linear textures, and its overall emphasis upon a decorative flat pattern of bold colour masses.
The great Byzantine tradition of tempera painting was developed in Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries by Duccio di Buoninsegna and Giotto. Their flattened picture space, generously enriched by fields and textures of gold leaf, was extended by the Renaissance depth perspectives in the paintings of Giovanni Bellini, Piero della Francesca, Carlo Crivelli, Sandro Botticelli, and Vittore Carpaccio. By that time, oil painting was already challenging the primacy of tempera, Botticelli and some of his contemporaries apparently adding oil to the tempera emulsion or overglazing it in oil colour.
Following the supremacy of the oil medium during succeeding periods of Western painting, the 20th century saw a revival of tempera techniques by such U.S. artists as Ben Shahn, Andrew Wyeth, and Jacob Lawrence and by the British painters Edward Wadsworth and Lucian Freud. It would probably also have been the medium of the later hard-edge abstract painters, had the new acrylic resin paints not proved more easily and quickly handled.