signing
The signature is a preliminary drawing that is on the primer or imprimitur of a painting and is covered by one or more layers of paint. It is the first artistic process carried out by the artist on a primed picture carrier. It fixes the essential characteristics of the composition to be executed with color.
The term “signature” has been replacing the term “preliminary drawing” originally used in art history for some time. The latter became too imprecise for painting research because it contains both the sketch , i.e. the image draft on paper or cardboard, and the preliminary drawing directly on the image carrier.
development
Until about the middle of the 15th century, the preliminary drawing and the signature were still a unit. The composition was designed by the artist directly on the drawing board. If it corresponded to his ideas, the colored version began. Around the end of the 15th century, the image preparation was done more and more frequently via drafts and studies outside of the image carrier on paper or cardboard. Only the completed preliminary drawing was transferred to the image carrier. In the course of the 16th century, the signature decreased in detail. Signature techniques were varied. Occasionally one finds washed signatures. Instead of its original function of invisibly fixing the forms, the signature took on painterly features and was integrated into the painting process.
technology
Each painting is usually signed in some form. The history of art distinguishes between two techniques of signing: 1. The scratching with a needle, the z. B. can be proven on medieval gold background images and 2. the use of signatures , as they are customary for hand drawings . Only since the application of the infrared investigation (IR) as part of the scientific study of the surface of paintings in the 1930s has it been possible to “see” through opaque layers of paint to a certain extent, that is, to make signatures visible and to evaluate them using art-scientific methods. Until then, they were only visible in unfinished pictures, were "guessed" here and there by a specialist or recognized by pictures that had suffered from chemical or physical influences in their structure, for example from saponification of paint layers containing lead or from plastering, i.e. i.e. the partial destruction when the varnish is removed. Only in one of the rare painting transfers from one destroyed image carrier to a new one did they occasionally become visible as a whole - reversed -.
exploration
Intensive research into signing and the signing technique did not begin until the 1950s, with Johannes Taubert's fundamental research. JRJ van Asperen de Boer made another decisive advance with the discovery of infrared reflectography (IRR) and its possibilities for painting research. The evaluation of the made visible signature expands the possibilities of the style-critical analysis and thus also the attribution of a painting to an artist. But it can also give an insight into the process of creating an image. For example, under the layer of paint on medieval panel paintings, letter abbreviations have been discovered in the signature, which suggest that these notes were intended for the employees of the workshop, in which color they should execute the individual colored areas. With the help of the signature, the master designed the composition, provided the necessary information on the coloring and accompanied its execution until the painting was completed.
Often times the signature was not completely hidden in medieval painting, for which various reasons are given. On the one hand, the not completely opaque application of paint could have been a method of letting the picture, which was created in complex color layer painting, dry more quickly and thus save time and money. On the other hand, it would have been possible to intentionally use the shadows hatched as a shadow zone of the paint layer in order to save the costs for dark pigments. In most cases, however, the signatures are presumably only visible to the naked eye again today due to the saponification process of the lead-white color tones.
The signature can now be made more or less clearly visible using the technical process of infrared reflectography (or previously infrared photography). For this purpose, an infrared light source first irradiates the examination subject. The reflection of the white primer and the darker signature lines on it is recorded by an infrared camera and processed in a connected PC. The resulting individual images are combined with graphics programs to form what is known as an infrared reflectography mosaic.
The art historical research hopes to be able to improve the attribution of paintings to individual painters with this comparatively young technical aid. a. characteristic features of the signature are compared with the artist's hand drawings that have been handed down by name.
In addition, arguments for first versions and duplicates from the hand of the same artist or from students can also be collected. If there are two almost identical panel paintings by an artist, one can assume that a version in which the signature differs from the final painting, e.g. B. in the composition of the motif or small details, while the creation was redesigned by the author and spontaneously improved in the process (so-called second thoughts ). A duplicate (or a copy), on the other hand, usually does not contain any subsequent improvements in the paint layer that differ from the signature, since the entire motif had already been satisfactorily designed and executed and the signature only copied this template.
literature
- David Bomfort (Ed.): Underdrawings in Renaissance Paintings (= Art in the making. ). National Gallery Comp., London 2002, ISBN 1-85709-987-7 .
- Knut Nicolaus: DuMont's picture lexicon to identify paintings. DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 1982, ISBN 3-7701-1243-1
- Knut Nicolaus: DuMont`s handbook of painting. DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 2003, ISBN 3-8321-7288-2
Individual evidence
- ↑ z. B. Lucas van Leyden : Last Judgment . Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.
- ^ Johannes Taubert: For the art-historical evaluation of scientific painting studies . Dissertation, Msch. Ms., Marburg 1956.
- ↑ JRJ van Asperen de Boer: Recent Developments in Infrared Reflektography of Paintings and its Applications in Art History . Ed .: International Council of Museums Committee for Conservation. Madrid 1972.