Precious Stones

Interesting online conversation from London Art Week looking at the use of stone in painting.

The talk chaired by  Emanuela Tarizzo from the Board of London Art Week split into two parts. Fabio Barry from the Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington talked how stone has been used over thousands of years to decorate buildings, in essence to paint them. I was fascinated by the Byzantine idea of creating thin tile veneers of marble to set in repeat patterns called book-matching.

Judith W. Mann from St Louis Museum of Art then talked about her current exhibition on painting on stone comparing artists who covered the whole stone and those who left some of it exposed to incorporate into the composition. I loved the attached image by Giuseppe Cesari of Perseus Rescuing Andromeda from 1593-4 painted on Lapis Lazuli which works the composition around the flaws in the stone.

I didn’t know that painters sometimes worked on stone or ever thought about the subtlety of the decoration of buildings with marble so this talk left me with a lot to look out for in the future.

 

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