Filarete, who wrote a long treatise on architecture and the arts
of design about 1464. It is published in the Vienna Quellenschriften,
neue Folge, No. III. Like Cennino, Filarete (loc. cit.
p. 641) speaks of oil painting as speciaUy practised in " Germany, "
and says it is a fine art when anyone knows how to compass it.
The medium is oil of linseed. " But is not this very thick?"
he imagines some one objecting. " Yes, but there is a way of
thinning it; I do not quite know how; but it will be stood out in a
vessel and clarify itself. I understand however that there is a
quicker way of managing this — but let this pass, and let us go
on to the method of painting." Filarete's evident uncertainty
about a process, which may be that of the Strassburg MS. for
producing oleum preciostim, and his reference to " Germany, "
inchnes us to look elsewhere than to Italy for knowledge about
the oil technique. As a fact the evidence of the recipe books
is borne out remarkably by that of other records which show
that a great deal of oil painting of one kind or another went
on in northern lands from the 13th century onwards. These
records are partly in the form of accounts, showing large quantities
of oil and resins furnished for the use of painters engaged
in extensive works of decoration; and partly in the form of
contracts for executing pictures " in good oil colours." It is
true that oil might be merely employed in mordants for gilding
or in varnishes, and for oil painting merely in house-decorator
fashion over wood, or for colouring statues and reliefs in stone;
nevertheless, with a use of proper critical methods, it has been
possible for M. Dalbon and others to establish incontestably
the employment in artistic wall and panel-painting of drying
oils and varnishes before the 15th century, both north and, to a
lesser extent, south of the Alps. These passages have been
too often quoted to be cited here. (See Eastlake, Materials,
p. 46 seq.; Berger, Beitrage iii. 206 seq., &c.) The earliest of the
accounts, an English one, is dated 1239: " The king (Henry III.)
to his treasurer and chamberlains. Pay from our treasury to
Odo the goldsmith and Edward his son one hundred and seventeen
shiUings and tenpence for oil, sandarac resin, and colours
bought, and for pictures executed in the Queen's Chamber at
Westminster." Another, about 1275 {temp. Edward I.) runs:
" To Robert King, for one cartload of charcoal for drying the
painting in the King's Chamber, Ills VHId." In Flanders
in 1304 there is an account (Dalbon, p. 43): " Pour 10 los d'oile
acatie pour faire destrempe as coideurs, " in 1373-1374 one for
XIII libvres d'oile de Unnis a faire couleurs " (p. 45). This was
for the use of a certain painter Loys, who executed mural
compositions of which some of the subjects are recorded. In
the matter of contracts, Dalbon (p. 52) prints one of 1320 prescribing
figure and landscape subjects, to be executed " en la
meilleur maniere que il pourront estre faites en painture, " and
concluding, " et seront toutes ces choses faites a huille, " and he
points con'incingly to such wording as a proof that the
work here under consideration must be regarded as artistic
figure-painting and not mere house decoration. Lastly, just
before 1400, the painter Jehan Malouel receives in 1399 oil with
colours for " la peinture de plusieicrs tables et tableaux d'autel, "
for the Carthusian convent of Champmol near Dijon, which
proves the use of oil for panel as well as for mural painting.
The further question about the survival of actual remains of work of the class just noticed is a very difficult one. There seems no reason why all this mural and panel work in oil of the 14th century should have perished, unless the medium was faulty, and, as is natural, many attempts have been made to identify extant examples as representing these early phases of the oil technique. Mural work we need not perhaps expect to find, for we know from the later experience of the Italians of the 1 6th century that it was difiicidt even then to find a safe method for oil painting on plaster. With panels preservation would be more likely, and it is always possible that some datable work of the kind may be identified that will carry the monumental history of oil painting back into the 14th century. An exhibition of early English painted panels was held in 1896 in the rooms of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and some good judges believed at the time that certain 14th-century panels from
St Michael at Plea, Norwich, were in oil, but this cannot be regarded as established.
If such then be the early history of oil painting, what attitude are we to adopt in face of the famous statement by Vasari that the technique was the invention of the Flemish painter Van Eyck in the year 1410? The statement was first made in the 2ist chapter of Vasari 's Introduction to his Lives of the Artists (1550), and runs as follows: " Fu una hellissima invention, ed un gran' commodity all' arte della pitlura, il trovare il color ilo a olio. Di che fu prima invent ore in Fiandra Giovanni da Bruggia (Jan van Eyck). In the Ufe of AntoneUo da Messina, in the same edition, Vasari dresses up the bare fact he here relates, and gives it the personal anecdotal turn that accords with his hterary methods. Here the " invention " follows on the incident of the splitting of a tempera panel varnished in oil, that according to traditional practice Van Eyck had put out in the sun to dry. This artist then turned his attention to devising some means for avoiding such mischances for the future, and, in Vasari's words, " being not less dissatisfied with the varnish than with the process of tempera painting, he began to devise means for preparing a kind of varnish which should dry in the shade, so as to avoid having to place his pictures in the sun. Having made experiments with many things both pure and mixed together, he at last found that hnseed and nut oil, among the many which he had tested, were more drying than all the rest. These, therefore, boiled with other mixtures of his, made him • the varnish which he had long desired." This varnish Vasari I goes on to say he mixed with the colours and found that it " lit up the colours so powerfully that it gave a gloss of itself, " without any after-coat of varnish.
Such is the famous passage in Vasari that has probably given rise to more controversy than any similar statement in the literature of the arts. The question is, in what did the " invention " of the Van Eycks, Hubert and Jan his younger brother, consist? and the first answer that would occur to anyone knowing alike the earlier history of the oO medium and Vasari's anecdotal predilections is the answer " There was no invention at all." The drying properties of linseed and nut oil and the way to increase these had long been known, as had also the preparation of sandarac oil-varnish, as well as a colourless (spirit?) varnish of which there is mention in accounts prior to the 15th century (Dalbon, p. 93). The mixing of varnish with oil for a medium was also known, and indeed the oleum preciosum may be the real " invention " of which Alberti and FUarete had only vaguely heard, and of which the Van Eycks later on received the credit. The epitaphs for the tombs of the two Van Eycks make no mention of such a feat as Vasari ascribes to them, and it is quite open to anyone to take up the position that it was no improvement in technique that brought to the Van Eycks their fame in connexion with oil painting, but rather an artistic improvement that consisted in using a traditional process to execute pictures which in design, finish, beauty and glow of colour far surpassed everything previously produced in the northern schools. Phny writes of the works of a Greek painter of about 400 B.C. that they were the first that had the power " to rivet the gaze of the spectator, " and in like manner we may say of the " Adoration of the Lamb " by the Van Eycks, the titular first fruits of the oil painter's technique, that it impressed the world of its time so mightily through its artistic power and beauty as to elevate to a sort of mystic importance the very method in which the paints were mixed. There is much force in this view, but at the same time it is impossible to deny to the Van Eycks the credit of technical improvements. For one thing, an artist who has an exceptional feeling for colour, texture and dehcacy of fim'sh will certainly pay special attention to his technical media; for another, the Van Eycks had a reputation long before Vasari's time for researches into these media. In 1456, fifteen years after the death of the younger brother, Bartolommeo Facio, of Spezzia, wrote a tract De viris illustrious in which he speaks of a certain " Joannus Gallicus, " who can be identified as Jan van Eyck. as specially " learned in those arts which contributed to the making of a picture, and was on that account credited
