Is Older Better?

Pick almost any area of human endeavour, and you will find that modern, new approaches trump the old.

You have a dental abscess? You’ll most likely prefer a modern dentist instead of going to a backstreet barber, or even a blacksmith, to have the tooth twisted out with a pair of pliers. Appendicitis, kidney stones or grumbling gall bladder? Rather a noisy MRI scan and keyhole surgery instead of a medieval doctor humming over you as he divines the problem. Do you prefer a jet plane or donkey convoy to travel far? Efficient induction hob or wood fire for daily cooking? The answers are obvious.

Then why is it that in art, painting in particular, there is so much hankering after the “techniques of the old masters”? Every second art teacher seems to want to reveal centuries-old “secrets” that students might miss if they pass on their (usually limited-time) offers.

Modern painters are streets ahead of the artists of old without harbouring any arcane knowledge. Oil painting goes back almost six hundred years, and back then art was pretty primitive. Painting substrates were rudimentary, and pigments were extremely limited for the most part, unbearably expensive for the rest. Simple compositional aspects that we take for granted now had yet to be “discovered”, for example, perspective and parallax. Even the basic, basic colour theory that we now exercise all the time had still to be developed.

The biggest advance was in pigments, and specifically the ability to synthesize classic colours as well as new. Everyone assumes that old pigments were stable and lightfast, but that was simply not always true. We can now point to some of them and say that they’ve survived centuries, but the “old masters” simply didn’t know because they were operating at the beginning of that time period – they were experimenting in the dark. Now with modern chemistry we can not only evaluate pigments for their characteristics but even design them. And the range of commercially available colours is greater than ever before.

One of the great challenges for restorers of old pieces is how their paint has been affected by time. But what is often less well-known is that the surfaces underneath have also suffered the ravages of moisture, heat, expansion and contraction, and even vermin and other microscopic infestations. It can get so bad that the paint layers have to be separated from the bottom in one or more pieces and be reassembled on an altogether new surface. One of the most resilient substrates has historically been metal like copper or lead, but convenience and cost have made cotton canvas and wood the substrates of choice for the past few centuries. Unfortunately, they are vulnerable to all of the decays mentioned here. Nowadays we have fabricated synthetic alternatives like medium-density fibreboard (MDF) that has many of the positive characteristics of wood and is less prone to variations in manufacture. While not impervious to moisture, it can be sealed in acrylic. Even better, aluminium composite material (ACM) provides a metallic surface supported by a polyethylene backing that will outlast any organic equivalent, and is almost totally resistant to thermal changes and decay.

Even the basic ability to go and paint conveniently outdoors is a fairly recent innovation (late nineteenth century), relying as it does on the invention of flexible aluminium tubes for carrying paint instead of hauling leaky animal organs or leather bottles. The range of paint-modifying mediums we have, and the standardized consistency of those products mean that artists on opposite sides of the world can achieve the same results with them.

The invention of acrylic polymers in the twentieth century meant the possibility of applying pigments much like oil paints that dry so much faster – which, like tubed paint, led to the growth of a whole new set of painting styles. And again, mass production meant that an ultramarine in Athens is the same as one in Australia.

Synthetic brushes are extremely effective substitutes and can even provide opportunities for different styles of painting to those possible with animal hair. Solvents that are free of volatile organic compounds line the shelves of every modern art store. We have grounds and gessos that are not made from dead rabbits or pigs. We can use apps on our phones like the camera lucida of old for achieving accurate initial drawings of our subjects, or even use LCD projectors in a way that would make the developers of the camera obscura envious.

But an even greater achievement since the times of the “old masters” is how art has evolved from its restrictive, often church-driven subject matter to the free and wide appreciation that it has today. No subject is off limits now. And where previously great art could only be owned by the privileged few, or seen by the public in churches or museums, there has been an explosion in the variety of media in which art is carried. Books, prints, cinema, TV, advertisements, product design, T-shirts, cellphones, urban murals, tattoos, the list is endless.

So why the fuss over fifteenth-century painters toiling in poor light with materials that have been surpassed? Simple - because they did great things with what they had, and made great strides forward for their times. But I would venture that there are modern-day Rembrandts and Vermeers who are churning out work today with contemporary, science-based artistry. Sure, they stand on the shoulders of giants, but they almost certainly see further and with more clarity, and are able to produce work that is more visionary and of a greater physical quality.

So, instead of subscribing to the myth that we modern artists will never achieve the heights of the old masters, we should rather acknowledge them as pathfinders and harbour every expectation that we can potentially outperform them.