EASTLAKE’S HISTORY OF OIL-PAINTING 279

of all expression of opinion on the part of Mr. Eastlake as to their comparative excellence, even to the artist, their immediate utility appears somewhat doubtful. One circumstance, however, is remarkable in all, the care taken by the great painters, without exception, to avoid the yellowing of their oil. Perfect and stable clearness is the ultimate aim of all the processes described (many of them troublesome and tedious in the extreme): and the effect of the altered oil is of course most dreaded on pale and cold colours. Thus Philippe Nunez¹ tells us how to purify linseed oil “for white and blues;” and Pacheco, “el de linaza no me quele mal: aunque ai quien diga que no a de ver el Azul ni el Blanco este Azeite.”* De Mayerne² recommends poppy oil “for painting white, blue, and similar colours, so that they shall not yellow;” and in another place, “for air-tints and blue;”-while the inclination to green is noticed as an imperfection in hempseed oil: so Vasari-speaking of linseedoil’ in contemporary practice-“benchè il noce e meglio, perchè ingialla meno.” The Italians generally mixed an essential oil with their delicate tints, including flesh tints (p. 431). Extraordinary methods were used by the Flemish painters to protect their blues; they were sometimes painted with size, and varnished; sometimes strewed in powder on fresh white-lead (p. 456). Leonardo gives a careful recipe for preventing the change of colour in nut oil, supposing it to be owing to neglect in removing the skin of the nut. His words, given at p. 321, are incorrectly translated: “una certa bucciolina,” is not a husk or rind-but “a thin skin,” meaning the white membranous covering of the nut itself, of which it is almost impossible to detach all the inner

* Arte de Pintura. Sevilla, 1649.

¹ [Arte da Pintura, 1615, p. 58. The recipe is translated by Eastlake at p. 329; and the following passage from Pacheco (who states that his blues and whites were never painted with the universally extolled nut oil, which he was not in the habit of using, but with that of linseed, “although (he adds) some say that blue and white should never see this oil”) at p. 362.]

² [In a MS. in the British Museum, Sloane, 2052; cited by Eastlake, p. 360.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]