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  • The Power of Color: Five Centuries of European Painting by Marcia B. Hall
  • Elizabeth C. Mansfield
Marcia B. Hall, The Power of Color: Five Centuries of European Painting ( New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 304; 304 color and 8 b/w illus. $45.00 cloth.

Marcia Hall's The Power of Color: Five Centuries of European Painting extends the scope of the author's earlier publications on the techniques and materials of early modern painting into the twentieth century. Hall's landmark 1992 book, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Art, helped to invigorate the practice of Technical Art History, which brings scientific analysis to bear on the study of individual works of art while also attending closely to artists' techniques and workshop practices for their evidentiary value. Further buoyed by the so-called "Material Turn" in cultural and historical studies, Technical Art History is now frequently applied to the study of eighteenth-century visual culture. The field has benefitted from this attention to technical and material considerations not least because it has helped advance scholarship beyond the conventional geographies of British and European artistic production; Technical Art History has also aided a much-needed recalibration of the scholarly status of painting in relation to the rest of eighteenth-century visual culture. Painting was never the ne plus ultra for eighteenth-century viewers and patrons. When deployed by scholars of eighteenth-century [End Page 486] visual culture, Technical Art History is as likely to be applied to porcelain figures, pastel drawings, lacquer cabinets, embroidered textiles, sugar sculptures, or ivory chairs as to paintings. Hall's focus on painting may strike some historians of eighteenth-century material culture as needlessly narrow, though many will undoubtedly find the book a useful complement to existing literature on artists' materials and techniques.

Hall makes clear from the outset that she is not necessarily writing for specialists, nor is the eighteenth century her area of primary interest: "My expertise is the Italian Renaissance, so that is my baseline here" (15). Her first two chapters are, in fact, devoted to her specialization, and it is here that she lays the groundwork for her discussions of European painting of later periods. The first chapter addresses fifteenth-century, mostly Italian, painting, and provides an introduction to tempera, fresco, and oil. The distinctive properties of these media, the different techniques used to exploit their unique qualities, and the history of their use by Renaissance artists are presented with precision and clarity. Occasional recourse to conservation reports or technical studies are integrated into the narrative in such a way that readers without any artistic or scientific training will have no difficulty understanding the import of these media for the history of early modern Italian painting, especially as practiced in Rome, Florence, and Venice. With the second chapter, Hall provides a likewise pellucid condensation of the argument she put forth in Color and Meaning. Here, she identifies four "modes" or "color styles" available to painters starting in the sixteenth century. Each mode is distinguished by its ground or imprimatura as well as by a particular approach to managing color and modeling. Hall associates each of the four modes with the artist chiefly responsible for bringing it to prominence: the sfumato (smoky) mode is linked with Leonardo; the unione (unified) with Raphael; the chiaroscuro (shadows-and-highlights) with Sebastiano del Piombo; and the cangiantismo (hue-shifting) with Michelangelo. Prior to the sixteenth century, Hall argues, artists would have learned the color style used in the workshop where they were trained. Some artists may have learned more than one mode, but most did not. Continuity of workshop practice was viewed favorably in the early Renaissance as it had been for several centuries. The conditions change, according to Hall, in the course of the sixteenth century, so that by the time artists like Caravaggio were launching their careers, painters were freely exploiting and even combining various modes.

Hall attributes this catholic approach to the use of color styles in Western Europe after the Renaissance to the breakdown of the workshop system. Shifts in patronage—fueled mostly by an expanding market for art to adorn the residences of those made...

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