According to some revisionists,
oil painting was invented only about 300 years ago. So, many oil masterpieces of an earlier period were deliberately incorrectly dated to meet the interests of artists (ancient paintings are sold more expensive than modern ones) and their customers (as the creation and transposition of the history of religions and powerful families into the deep past, usually to justify certain territorial claims).
This is confirmed by statistics on the use of the very
concepts of "oil painting" in English:
The first two red peaks of
"oil painting" are erroneously dated modern editions. And the earliest mention of these phrases, among all the English-language books scanned and recognized by Google, appeared only about 330 years ago in this handbook , written by a certain C.K: "
Art's Master-piece: Or, A Companion for the Ingenious of either Sex. Containing The Art of Limning and Painting in Oil, etc. In all particulars, viz. Drawing and Painting Faces, Bodies, Garments, Landskip, Preparing and Laying on Colours, also colcuring Mazzotinto Prints, Gilding On Wood, Metals and Leather. The newest Experiment in Japaning, to imitate the Indian way, Plain and in Speakles, Rock-work, Figures, etc."
See page 14 for guidelines for making oil paints, listing suitable colors:
Many of these colors
first began to be mentioned in English literature less than half a century before this handbook was written:
For clarity, you can compare the mention of "oil painting" with the mention of the concepts of
"engraving" and "tempera", regularly encountered in English literature for the last 5 centuries.
In Spanish, the phrases
"oil painting", "oil on canvas" and "oil portrait" begin to be mentioned for the first time just about 250 years ago:
At the same time, it is believed that many Spanish artists of the Renaissance and the Golden Age (such as
Hernando de los Llanos,
El Greco,
Diego Velázquez and many others) successfully painted in oil several centuries before these first mentions, not counting the prevalence of oil painting in the
Spanish Netherlands.
Again, for comparison,
mentions of an earlier technique, tempera, in Spanish literature:
In Italian, the phrases
"oil painting", "oil portrait" begin to be evenly mentioned about 250 years ago:
At the same time, there are several cases of mentioning these concepts more than 300 years ago. As, for example, in the book "
Biographies of painters, sculptors and architects" by
Giovanni Baglione and "
Memoir by Signor Gaspare Celio on the Habits of Christ. On the names of the painters of the paintings in some churches, facades, and palaces of Rome" by
Gaspare Celio. But both of these books use suspiciously modern fonts and formatting (indentation before paragraphs, the way of page numbering, and the like), and the names of the
authors of these books, minor Roman artists, began to be mentioned in Italian literature only about 250 years ago. But even if we assume the likelihood that these books were dated correctly, and not deliberately dated to an earlier time, "oil painting" first begins to be mentioned in Italian literature more than a century after the creation of oil masterpieces by Raphael and other early Italian painters.
Of course, in support of conventional views about oil painting, we can assume that Google, when scanning old books in libraries around the world, had some artistic preference, and they skipped old books with mentions of oil painting, preferring them to old mentions of egg yolk and water painting, tempera. But apart from the frequency of references to thematic words in European languages, the oil paintings of the great Renaissance masters are characterised by their use of volume, perspective and detail, reaching an almost photographic quality. Such a high quality of images, uncharacteristic of their era, is put down to the genius of the masters of the past, although such artwork violates the logical principle of "from the simple to the complex". That said, if one takes the reliability of the dating of Renaissance oil paintings at face value, the portraits of many respectable people made in a later period may seem like mockery or childish scribbles, compared to earlier oil masterpieces:
"Thomas Bacon (1711 – 1768) was an Episcopal clergyman, musician, poet, publisher and author. Considered the most learned man in Maryland of his day."If we allow for the possibility that oil portraiture only originated some 300 years ago and that many masterpieces were deliberately transported back in time by the will of churches and aristocrats, then the early portraits of respected figures, in the spirit of this depiction by Thomas Bacon, no longer seem naive, but may well be seen as important historical artefacts that meet the standards of their time.
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