Oil painting is painting with pigment, the colored powder that every paint starts from, ground into a drying oil, most often linseed oil pressed from the seeds of flax.
The oil hardens slowly, so the paint stays soft long enough to be blended on the picture itself and laid on in thin, transparent layers.
This slow, flexible material became the main medium of European painting from the fifteenth century on. The man usually named as its inventor is Jan van Eyck, a Flemish painter who worked in Bruges.
The picture held up as the proof is his Arnolfini Portrait, dated 1434, in which a merchant and his wife stand side by side in a bedroom. Its reds and greens still glow in the National Gallery in London.
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The idea that van Eyck invented oil paint goes back to a book published more than a hundred years after he died. In 1550 the Italian painter Giorgio Vasari brought out his Lives of the Artists.
This long series of biographies covers painters, sculptors and architects, most of them Italian. Among its subjects is a Flemish painter Vasari calls John of Bruges. Readers have long taken him to be Jan van Eyck: Jan is the Flemish form of the name, and Bruges is where van Eyck worked.
In Vasari's telling, John varnished a finished panel and set it out in the sun to dry, and the heat split the wood open at every joint. He wanted a varnish that would harden in the shade, so he tried the oils within reach. Linseed oil and nut oil turned out to dry best.
Vasari then has him mix his colors with these oils. The result hardened firmly without any sun, and once dry it resisted water. In this version, oil painting is born from a cracked panel.
It is a neat story, and it is wrong on the main point. People were painting with oil centuries before van Eyck was born, and the oldest known examples are not in Europe at all. They are on the walls of caves in Afghanistan.
Buddhas in Afghanistan, a monk in Germany
The caves are in the Bamiyan valley, in central Afghanistan, where Buddhist monks once dug shrines and living quarters into the cliffs…
What You'll Discover
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