Notes from Source: Depth by graphic means-liner perspective, foreshortening, hatching-was mastered by Greek draughtsmen by about the middle of the fifth century B.C., but the first flowering of true painting took place later in that century: only then did painters learn to create modulated color surfaces. There are three categories of techniques for that purpose: the gradation of colors through mixture, overlaying or glazing, and patching. Apparently painters blended their colors in the pigments, in a preparatory and recondite process: custom-blending was unknown. At least Plato, Aristotle and others are strikingly ignorant of basic mixing formulas. Overlaying of colors appears on white-ground lekythoi of the late fifth and early fourth centuries and is first attested in literature in Aristotle (under the terminus technicus ἐπιπολή, De sensu 440b). The one color technique widely attested for the later fifth century (and, in fact, often equated with the birth of painting) is the one called “skiagraphia” or shadow painting. In modern studies the term is rendered as “shading,” “chiaroscuro” or as “perspective and shadow-effect combined.” These interpretations, however, are based mainly on post-Hellenic sources, which reflect only a vague memory of the technique. Examination of ten references in Plato, two in Aristotle and a passage in Pliny, N.H. 35.29, translated from a Classical treatise on colors, shows that the technique featured patches of strongly contrasting colors, which intensified each other when viewed from close-up but blended into luminous effects when seen from the appropriate distance. In other words, skiagraphia was an impressionistic technique, using divisions of bright colors and relying on the phenomenon of optical color fusion. Of the extensive scientific literature produced during the Hellenic age, little remains, but its vestiges show that the Greeks were familiar with optical color fusion, the mutual alteration of contiguous colors and the difference between the additive and the subtractive color systems. The skiagraphia technique was the artistic expression of that knowledge.

Further Notes: Place: New York, etc Publisher: Archaeological Institute of America