RKD STUDIES

Another borrowing from the Dutch that is used extensively in the text of the manuscript by our anonymous writer but is not listed in the one-word glossary, is glowingness. The word and its effects in painting were clearly important to the writer, given that he introduced the term by emphasising it with large captions [5]. The author writes that in order to make the picture ‘glow with liveliness’, the painter needs to use ‘fair or clear colours’, but at the same time observe ‘the natural colours’ of the model. Again, the advice is ‘[to] let red have an interest in all your mixtures’.¹ It is thus likely that we are talking about flesh colours again.

The terms gloed and gloijend had been used in Netherlandish art literature since around 1600. It may have been Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) who learned of the concept in Venice and, back in Haarlem, made it known to his friend Karel van Mander who included it in his Schilder-boeck and thereby integrated it into the Dutch art vocabulary.² We can see that Goltzius was concerned with glowingness and the effects of warm and lively colours in the human flesh in his painting of Danae receiving Jupiter in the guise of a shower of gold of 1603 [6].

One early instance of the word in Britain is to be found in a manuscript bearing the title Miniatura, or the Art of Limning. The author of the manuscript, which was widely circulated among circles of British art lovers and virtuosi, has been identified as the miniature painter Edward Norgate (1581-1650). He made two versions of the text: the first between 1627 and 1628, as a commission by the royal physician Théodore de Mayerne (1573-1644/5) who had a keen interest in recipes and instructions used by artists, the second between 1648 and 1650.³ The English miniature painter discussed glowingness only in the second version, although he probably adopted it from Van Mander’s Schilder-boeck, which he had already consulted for his first manuscript.⁴ Besides, Norgate does not mention the term when speaking about Netherlandish art, but relating to another English miniature painter, Peter Oliver (1589-1674), and his commission by King Charles I (1600-1649) to make miniature copies of Italian paintings in the royal collection. He states that in his miniature copy on vellum, Oliver used Indian lake, a dark red pigment gained from resin, to achieve ‘glowing shadows’ of a similar quality as those in the original oil paintings by Titian (1488-1576):

‘Peter Oliver […] made such expressions of those deep and glowing shadows in those Histories he copied after Titian, that no oil painting could appear more warm and fleshly then those of his hand’.⁵

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Courtesy of the British Library Board, BL MS Harl.2337, fol. 48v.

Oliver accomplished glowing effects in miniature painting, especially in the shaded parts of the nude figures, like Goltzius in his Sleeping Danaë. We may observe these effects in Oliver’s miniature copies after Titian, as Norgate pointed out, but also in those after Correggio (1489-1534), such as in a painting of Venus, Cupid and a Satyr, another setting with a sleeping nude [7]. The image features a satyr discovering Venus and Cupid resting under a bright blue drapery. The glowing shadows must have been even more striking when they were made in the 1630s, since Indian lake is a fugitive pigment.

If Norgate learned about glowingness from reading Van Mander, he would have been aware of the common Italian and Netherlandish tradition of colorito. If the term reached him via oral tradition, too, he would have been able to see the conceptual relation through his travels and intellectual engagement with the arts of both countries. Goltzius, however, was not mentioned in the Miniatura for the glowing colours he produced in his late career as a painter, but for his skills in pen drawing and engraving as an exemplary artist of disegno.⁶

As Norgate stated, the miniature painters used particular combinations of pigments to achieve the effect of glowingness. He reported that John Hoskins (1589-1664), who was well-known for his miniature paintings after portraits by Van Dyck, preferred mixtures of deep browns such as umber or earth of cologne, Indian lake and a certain brown-yellow pigment made from dyer’s greenwood, called, after its inventor, Sir Nathaniel Bacon’s Pinke.⁷ In a portrait of King Charles I, the red and yellow hues of what must have been glowing shadows once, can still be recognised in the visible part of the king’s neck and the shaded part of his chin [8].

The British accounts of glowingness were mainly concerned with mixtures of pigments that were needed to achieve the effect. To apply glowing colours in oil painting, however, requires technical insight: the hue and tone of the brown-grey ground layer of the dead colour are relevant, and from there semi-transparent mixtures of mainly warm colours have to be applied layer by layer.⁸ Netherlandish painters would have learned these techniques as part of their training, and apparently did not see any need to write about them. In Britain, however, this knowledge must have been sought after by painters and virtuosi alike.

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John Hoskins (I)
Portrait of King Charles I (1600-1649), c. 1640-1665
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv./cat.nr. SK-A-4325