Martín García Cros, expert in historical pictorial techniques, reveals in the Academy the secrets of the Venetian School
The renowned portraitist Martín García Cros, an expert in historical pictorial techniques, delivered last Tuesday, October 15, the conference “La desaparecida técnica pictórica de la Escuela Veneciana. De Tiziano a Tiepolo” (The missing pictorial technique of the Venetian School. From Titian to Tiepolo), organized by Jaume Armengou, secretary general of the IESE Business School and full academician and president of the Section of Technological Sciences of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), and held in the Assembly Hall of Catalan labor Promotion of National Work, headquarters of the Royal Corporation.
The session consisted of a workshop in which García Cros expressed his explanation on several canvases on an easel, focusing on materials and methodologies. He talked about the Venetian school of painting, its technique and its painters (Bellini, Giorgione, Tiziano, Tintoretto, Veronese, Caravaggio, El Greco, Velázquez, Constable, Tiepolo…) and made primers with plaster and lead white, with red earths of iron oxide and other materials that have been used in painting over the centuries.
Also, the artist prepared temples to the egg and painted with tempera grizzlies. “As Titian said, thirty varnishes wont be enough”, he explained as he applied primers and prepared oils with pigment and flax and walnut oil to paint with them as teachers of different schools and traditions did throughout history. In some cases sharing techniques; in others, reserving them with zeal.
In the session it was visualized how it’s possible to draw on a primer with the stick of a brush. In this way, technical to technical, the detail of the methodologies of the Venetian School was revealed. The doubt about the validity of the verifications of authors of classic paintings was planted. Something that is known among experts and that the neophytes cannot even imagine.
