#cennini

[loki-posting]

i'm such a massive fucking nerd about renaissance color theory and semiotics come here

so ummm i started writing something and im wondering if there are any color theory nerds on lokean tumblr or art corners of tumblr who would be interested in reading it when it's done

it's a looong post containing:

an abridged dive into the history of the cangiante canon and it's methods specifically for painting celestial beings and other fluid entities during the 13th and 14th centuries in italy

how i've used it throughout my academic career, my post-college work, and why i chose to paint an altarpiece for loki in that style

why i'm considering completely redoing the altarpiece in the future

i wrote my senior thesis including some of these ideas in a different context-- thought this was before i connected with loki-- so i think i would like to spend a little time reflecting on it as i'm currently further deconstructing what i've still internalized from a religion i haven't followed in years and how that affects my application of the cangiante color application methods when appropriating the style for my own self expression. it's such an important part of my journey, but it's time to revisit it and close some more doors i think. reinvent some of what i've been working with, if you will. i guess i don't really know what will come of it yet though. we'll see!

[vintagebooksdesign]

MADONNA AND CHILD by Filippino Lippi. The Jules Bache Collection, 1949, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

From Il Libro dell’Arte the author Cennino Cennini (c.1360 – before 1427) writes:

On the Character of Ultramarine Blue, and how to make it:

Ultramarine blue is a colour illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect beyond all other colours: one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would not still surpass.

The deep blue colour pigment ultramarine was made from precious lapis lazuli, which was brought by Italian traders to Italy from mines in Afghanistan – hence its name derived from the Latin ultramarinus meaning “beyond the sea”.  

In this painting of the Madonna and Child (c.1483-84), the artist Filippino Lippi has used the finest ultramarine in the Virgin’s robe. This act of material display would have been requested and specifically paid for by the wealthy Florentine banker Filippo Strozzi who commissioned the painting.

[renpenperspective]

accidentally learning.

...if you are in a place where many good masters have been, so much the better for you. But I give you this advice: take care to select the best one every time, and the one who has the greatest reputation. And, as you go on from day to day, it will be against nature if you do not get some grasp of his style and of his spirit. For if you undertake to copy after one master today and after another one tomorrow, you will not acquire the style of either one or the other, and you will inevitably, through enthusiasm, become capricious, because each style will be distracting your mind. You will try to work in this man's way today, and in the other's tomorrow, and so you will not get either of them right. If you follow the course of one man through constant practice, your intelligence would have to be crude indeed for you not to get some nourishment from it. Then you will find, if nature has granted you any imagination at all, that you will eventually acquire a style individual to yourself, and it cannot help being good; because your hand and your mind, being always accustomed to gather flowers, would ill know how to pluck thorns.

-Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman's Handbook

damn. the renaissance knew its shit.