The irony of Louisa Matthew's life, she will tell you, is that she always avoided taking a chemistry class. Now she has the periodic table of elements posted in her office.
Matthew is a Union College professor of art history. She started her academic career hoping to learn more about life in Renaissance art workshops – what she calls “the business of art” – answering questions such as how apprentices were treated, and what painters kept on hand in their shops.
But her most recent finding, which netted national publicity, used chemical analysis of Renaissance paint samples to uncover unusual ingredients.
In doing so, Matthew and collaborator Barbara Berrie, a con- servation scientist at the National Gallery of Art, may have solved a long-standing mystery about Venetian paintings of the Renaissance: What is it about the paint that makes the subjects appear to glow?
Glass particles mixed in the paints may be the explanation. So far they have found yellow, blue, green and clear silica. Applied in thin layers, the glass is penetrated by light and shines back from the canvas.
The chemical analysis built off Matthew's work establishing that Venetian painters in the early 1500s were buying their pigments from a “color seller” – a specialty shop previously unknown to exist at the time. In doing so, she had theorized, they were probably meeting other artisans such as glassmakers and potters, and sharing techniques and materials.
The most recent discovery, and the direction of her research, were unexpected but most welcome, Matthew said.
“You go in with a set idea of what you want to know, and if you keep an open mind, you go in all these different directions,” Matthew said. “It's like a detective working in another era. You're going back in time. You get these amazing stories, you find these documents and they speak to you.”
IN THE ARCHIVES
Matthew goes back in time by searching through archives. She found the clues for her findings while on sabbatical in the state archives of Venice.
When she is researching, Matthew said, she will spend days at a time poring through the archives. It's dusty work and she had to learn to decipher the cramped Italian handwriting. Nevertheless, Matthew said she could spend the rest of her life researching in the archives.
“It's a different world,” Matthew said. “You have to be careful not to make assumptions that they're just like us only earlier. And at the same time, you get these vivid stories.”
The story of the mystery ingredients started with Matthew's search through an archive of wills. Each will includes an inventory of the deceased's possessions. An artist's will would include an inventory of his workshop.
She also researched through tax records, which list the properties owned by a holder and often a list of renters, telling her who lived where and what they were paying.
“People who study art history tend to study the big guys,” Matthew said. “Fine. But I wanted to get a more synchronic picture of painting in Venice. That's not easy, it's more fragmented.”
'VENDECOLORI'
The wills were often indexed by profession, and Matthew looked for wills marked “painter.” One day she came across a will marked “vendecolori,” literally translated as “color seller.” She was surprised.
“I'd never seen this before,” Matthew said. The color seller's inventory included large amount of silver and white lead, substances used to make paint pigments. “They were large amounts, so I thought, is this a vocational name – vendecolori?”
Hoping to learn more from a manufacturers of the pigments, she looked for the inventory of a manufacturer. Two weeks later, she came across the will of a manufacturer of white lead and in it, a list of people who owed him money. The list included eight names, all of whom had the designation “vendecolori.”
“I remember sitting there and thinking, did somebody plant this here? This is too good to be true,” Matthew said.
Matthew had uncovered the existence of a profession – a specialist in supplying paint pigments to artists – not known to exist for at least another half-century.
The conventional assumption in art history, Matthew said, is that until the end of the 16 th century, painters found their supplies amid the general merchandise of an apothecary.
COLLABORATION
Berrie, who first met Matthew at a symposium on art and science at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., said Matthew's work in the archives was key to the later discoveries of the chemical analysis.
“She's the one, her work, established the profession of the color sellers in Venice around 1500,” Matthew said. “And that notion is very important because that gives the idea that artists could go to specialists who were providing new materials, more materials and specially refined materials as opposed to going to an apothecary.”
Matthew eventually found an inventory from a vendecolori shop, listing 102 substances and objects. She wrote about the discovery of the profession in a 2002 art academic journal. But she continued to wonder how the existence of color sellers influenced the work of Venetian painters.
Meeting Berrie gave her a chance to find out.
“She gave me her card and told me that she had discovered that inventory from the venetian color sellers shop,” Berrie said. The two applied for and won a fellowship, pairing an art historian with a conservator, to travel for two months and study for two months.
They traveled to London and to Germany and Austria to review pigment analysis.
“What was kind of wild, when we went off on this trip we'd probably spent two hours together,” Berrie said. “You walk into the hotel in London thinking, 'I'm going to live with this person for 12 days.' But we had a wonderful time together.”
Matthew and Berrie looked at samples from painters working in Venice in the early 1500s. When the paint analysis turned up ingredients used by glassblowers, potters and dye-makers, it confirmed Matthew's hypothesis. The artists were meeting at the color seller and trading techniques and materials.
For Matthew, it is a fascinating side journey. For the art world, it is exposing a story of a far more vibrant artistic community than had been known to exist.
In a roundabout way, Matthew said she has learned something about life in a Renaissance art workshop.
“I was pursuing the business of art, and I learned to start thinking of it as the business of color, a business that connects all of the artisan trades, dyers and glass blowers,” Matthew said. “The inter-connections between the trades is fascinating.”