The sky is the one part of a painting that painters could never copy from life, because it never holds still. They dealt with it in turn with gold, with painted ceilings, with a smoke experiment and with sky studies made on a hillside, from medieval panels to Constable on Hampstead Heath and a canvas painted from an airplane window. The story ends on twelve guides, one for each kind of sky, from the sun to the rainbow.
A model holds still for an afternoon. A mountain holds still for years. A cloud that took twenty minutes to observe is gone before the painter has finished the second sketch, and a sunset changes faster than a brush can be reloaded. For most of art history, painters did not paint the sky they saw. They painted the sky they could remember, or the sky they could invent.
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The most famous invented sky of the Renaissance was not copied from anything. Around 1474 Andrea Mantegna finished the ceiling of the Camera degli Sposi in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, and in the middle of it he painted a round opening, an oculus, with a sky showing through. Figures lean over its rim and look down into the room, and a peacock watches from the edge.
Painters who tried to catch the real sky had a harder time. In October 1822 John Constable wrote that he had made about 50 careful studies of skies. On the back of one of them, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, he wrote in ink the date, 5 September 1822, and a note: "looking S.E. noon. Wind very brisk. & effect bright & fresh. Clouds. moving very fast." He was not describing a picture. He was recording what the sky had done in the few minutes he had to catch it.
Between a counterfeit sky that stays put above a room in Mantua and a notebook of studies made at speed on a hillside, painters tried gold, smoke, ceilings and clouds. The story begins with the gold.
What You'll Discover
Why some skies are never blue.
How a ceiling became a sky.
What Leonardo did with smoke.
What Constable wrote on the back.
Who painted the sky from above.