Artistic Techniques, Materials and Formal Analysis
This domain is examined through the formal-analysis question and through technique questions attached to specific works. You need to name a medium correctly and show how that medium produced the look of the object.
Core rules and concepts
- Wall painting. Buon fresco: pigment in water on wet lime plaster, fixed by carbonation, so the colour is in the wall; executed in giornate, with a sinopia or cartoon underneath. Fresco secco and tempera on dry wall are less durable. A glossy, opaque, integral surface suggests fresco; a chalky or flaking one suggests secco or later overpaint.
- Panel painting. Tempera: egg-yolk binder, gesso ground, fast drying, hatched modelling, sharp edges. Oil: slow-drying, translucent glazes, blended transitions, deep shadow (van Eyck, Leonardo).
- Sculpture. Lost-wax bronze casting; marble carving, with the pointing machine for copies and direct carving in the modern period; polychrome carved wood in Spain.
- Mosaic and glass. Tesserae in opus tessellatum; pot-metal stained glass held in lead cames.
- Printmaking. Relief: woodcut. Intaglio: engraving with a burin, etching with acid (Rembrandt), drypoint. Planographic: lithography (Senefelder, 1796). Photography: daguerreotype and calotype, 1839.
- Modern materials. Steel, reinforced concrete, curtain wall, industrial glass.
- Formal analysis. Work through composition, line, colour (hue, value, saturation), light, space (perspective or its refusal), texture, scale, proportion, rhythm. Separate description from interpretation with Panofsky's three levels: pre-iconographic, iconographic, iconological.
Worked example
A question asks why a 15th-century Annunciation looks different from a Baroque one. Start with the medium: tempera on panel - opaque, linear, gold ground, flat space, symbolic scale; oil on canvas - glazes, deep shadow, a single light source, the angel interrupting a real interior. Then argue that the oil medium makes the shadow and the psychology possible, while the tempera surface favours the emblem and the gold.
Traps that cost marks
- Not every wall painting is a fresco.
- Lithography is planographic, not intaglio; etching is intaglio, not relief.
- Do not confuse the support (panel, canvas, wall) with the medium (tempera, oil, fresco).
- Iconography is not "symbolism in general": it is the identification of subjects and their conventional meanings.