Raphael and his painting Bindo Altoviti ... stepping into Baroque during the High Renaissance period. Raphael reveals how make your painting beautiful with varying your edges, losing and finding edges
Raphael is at the height of his skills in this masterpiece. The end of High Renaissance and the door is wide open into a new art period called Baroque. Michelangelo is always noted as the bridge into Baroque, but the world has missed what this painting does and how it will influence artist for the ages.
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. has three Raphael's in one room that show the sequence of art history from Renaissance to High Renaissance to Baroque. Regardless of the period this painting is a truly beautiful masterpiece. breath taking skill, a touch equal to any artist in the world. Bella.
So we're in front of Raphael's Bindo al-Tobici and at this point in 1515 you can say goodbye
to high renaissance and hello to Baroque. So what happens now is in each one of the previous
paintings there's been a sharp line and all of a sudden with Raphael's painting is you're starting
to get these soft soft marks and these soft hair marks and now that's indicative of the oil paint.
Only the oil paint will give the artist the time to take various different types of brushes while
it's wet and to smear and blur it and then having some lines sharper and softer and disappear and
then sharp and soft just absolutely beautiful handling of variations so of an edge. So here
all of a sudden you have Botticelli's Birth of Venus in the Primavera where Botticelli is
having these few lines change in value and thickness. Raphael's taking that up a step and
not only is it thinner it's also lighter and darker softer and sharper and it's just elegant
and beautiful. There's no possible way to do this in egg tempera. This is full blown out oil painting
but also it's it's there's a separation from egg tempera where egg tempera is outlining everything
in a thought process and then artists are painting with oil paint in the egg tempera.
Now there's not. Now he's just saying this is oil painting. I don't have to do any of the techniques
any of the steps I've done in egg tempera and this is its own way of painting. This is actually a
massive jump. Egg tempera is where you're taking pigment dry pigment grinding it up and adding it
to egg yolk. So when you make an egg yolk and distilled water the egg yolk is the binder that
holds it together whereas opposed to taking dried pigment adding it to an oil like linseed or
safflower or walnut oil and therefore the water and the egg is drying as you make a stroke
where the oil paint is staying wet for the day for two days for three days so you keep
blending and smearing and blending and smearing and working on it. I love the unfinished quality
of the hand. You're going to see this in balasquez where Sargent's going to copy.
So this is just a hint of a highlight right here where the rest of it is gone and then just that
little flicker just a little flicker of the jewelry the very little of the of the arm and
the sleeve showing up. As soon as I want to say he's full-blown baroque and the line quality is
gone I still see a hint of that line there but that's okay. This is so beautiful just you know
beautiful doesn't tell the world how someone painted it. Like if you look at and you notice
the highlight on the lip and then all of a sudden the highlight just disappears
and the cleaner and prettier color on the lip and then it just gets grayer and disappears.
The hint of pattern in the shirt and then it just disappears.
Very indicative of high Italian Renaissance paintings is to find the most beautiful lip,
the most beautiful nose, the most beautiful eyes. The next period that's going to follow is going
to be Mandarism and there's going to be a revolt against that but gosh this part of the painting
is truly we've changed. It's almost like you could say we're a hundred years farther in time.
