Illuminating the past

Sylvana Barrett holds up a piece of parchment. Not a clean-cut rectangle ready for artwork or calligraphy but an irregular slab, shaped like an animal pelt. Which is exactly what it is -- the scraped skin of a goat. This piece, she explains, is only partially prepared. She points out areas where bits of fur still adhere, then hands over a small, finished sheet. It looks like paper, has the glassy smoothness of paper, but it also has a slight softness that it’s tempting to call fuzzy. It’s white, but not the uniform white of commercial-grade paper. Instead, the parchment has a subtle, dappled pattern, like sunlight on rippling water.

Just touching the stuff feels a bit like time travel. This was the paper of the ancient world up to the Renaissance, after all. Wonder fades to irony when Barrett mentions that she bought the parchment off the Internet, from a supplier in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He’s one of the few in the world, she says, who still prepares parchment the old-fashioned way, scraping it by hand.

That kind of anachronistic authenticity is what drives Barrett, an artist-turned-researcher who’s become an expert in the making of illuminated manuscripts. Her expertise grew in the course of her own evolution as an artist. More than 20 years ago, curious about why early Renaissance tempera paintings looked the way they looked and why she couldn’t capture those qualities in her own work, she turned to writings from the period for answers.

“Finally, it occurred to me that it wasn’t just the way you paint but what you paint with,” she says. “Then, of course, I wanted to know, what are these things and how do you use them?”

Now her treehouse of a home in Woodland Hills is filled with luminous tempera paintings of her own and the parchment pages of an illuminated manuscript in progress. Her studio shelves sag with manuals of technical information on historical painting methods. Small wooden panels bearing trial runs with different techniques are stacked on the floor. A floor-to-ceiling shelving unit holds glass jars of pigment that span the color spectrum.

Early vocal music plays softly in the background as Barrett, 51, puts aside the parchment to talk about what goes on top of it: gold pounded thin as a moth’s wing, paint made from precious minerals and bound by egg whites, with a dash of sugar or honey added to keep the paint pliable on the page. She’ll be offering such demonstrations twice weekly at the Getty Center during the exhibition “Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe,” which opens Tuesday.

A comprehensive look at painting on the page from 1470 to 1560, the show includes about 130 manuscripts, secular and religious texts, illustrated with exquisite naturalism. The period represents the last hurrah for manuscript painting. With the advent of the printing press in the mid-15th century, such lavish, one-of-a-kind productions were hardly cost-effective. The manuscripts, primarily commissioned by Burgundian rulers and courtiers (whose territories included Flanders) did, however, remain impressive as displays of wealth and power.

“The materials themselves were quite expensive,” notes the Getty’s curator of manuscripts, Thomas Kren, speaking by phone from London. Kren organized the exhibition and co-wrote the extensive catalog with his counterpart at the British Library, Scot McKendrick.

“Lapis was even more expensive at the time than gold. Anyone who looked at these books at the time and saw the colors knew they were expensive. The quality of the materials was the highest -- you’re talking about a flock of sheep that went into the making of a book, and the labor of the scribe, the artist, to do the borders and the miniatures, and the binding as well.”

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A HOW-TO GUIDE

Precious and rare as they are, the manuscripts will be encased, jewel-like, behind glass for the show. But most of them, especially the devotional books of hours, were made for the hand, by the hand. Some of the prayer books are just a few inches tall, and most measure less than 8 inches high.

At Barrett’s demonstrations in the museum courtyard, visitors can touch the tools and materials that manuscript illuminators and gilders used: the greasy red-clay bole painted on the parchment as an adhesive for the gold leaf; the gilder’s knife, long and flat like a frosting spatula, used to cut the gold to size; the squirrel-hair gilder’s tip used to lift the delicate sheets of gold and lay them in place on the page; agate-tipped burnishers, originally made with animal’s teeth, to polish the gilded areas to a luminous shine; and shell gold, made from leftover flakes of gold gathered into a hard cake and used to paint delicate details and so called because artists used to store it in shells.

“You can’t really go find a book on how to do this,” Barrett says, though she’s thought about the possibility of writing one herself. For each painting method she researches, Barrett compiles a three-ring binder, fat with annotated, highlighted, carefully tabulated photocopies. Most of the articles are focused on conservation and restoration, she says, opening the binder marked “Early Panel,” but “they do analyze work layer by layer, and X-ray them so you can see what’s underneath. What comes out of it all is that painting, then, was a multilayered, organized process, whereas today, we focus on the surface and work that way. They were focusing on layers, and each layer had an important role to play in your finished piece.”

Barrett’s primary sources are handbooks and manuscripts written centuries ago with instructions for a variety of painting methods. “They all have recipes that are pretty easy to follow, but they won’t say, ‘Get a teaspoon of this and a cup of that.’ They’ll say, ‘Use a bean of this and a pea of that.’ It takes awhile to figure out. I’ll try all the recipes, take notes and make samples.”

The most valuable texts, she says, are those written by artists who had practiced the craft. Not only are the recipes reliable, but the writing also is often full of juicy, period detail. For example, Cennino Cennini, the 15th century author of a thorough guide to tempera painting, assumes, Barrett says, that the reader is a young man who wants to become a painter.

“He gives you a lot of good advice about your life, how much time you should spend with women, how much food and drink you should partake of. It’s charming to read even if you’re not interested in the subject. Some of the illuminated manuscript texts say things like, don’t lean over the work while you’re working because your dandruff will ruin your project.”

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PIGMENT AND PROSE

Manuscripts were typically made in workshops, with labor divided among numerous specialists. (A separate Getty exhibition, “The Making of a Medieval Book,” re-creates the interior of such a workshop.) By the time an illuminator received manuscript pages to paint, a calligrapher would have laid down any text, and a gilder -- sometimes different from the illuminator -- would have laid the gold leaf. The painter would outline the design in ink, often tracing figures from pattern books developed in the workshop.

Pigments were derived from minerals, plants and insects, and even the most fugitive colors in bound manuscripts have remained vivid because the pages have been so rarely exposed to light. Barrett points to a chunk of stone, azurite, used to make sea-foam green or sky blue. On the glass table, she scatters some little dark nuggets from a jar. They’re cochineal bugs that grind down into a blazing scarlet. And she holds up a small plastic pouch of the ever-precious lapis, $300 worth.

To demonstrate the preparation of the paint, she uses another blue, ultramarine, which is nearly as dazzling. She shakes some of the powder into a small glass bowl and mixes in a little water, stirring the pigment into a paste with a tiny salt spoon. At this point, a binder is needed. The Renaissance illuminators in the exhibition, Barrett says, used “glair,” the yellow liquid that settles out from beaten egg whites, gum from the acacia tree, or a combination of the two. With a cluster of little bowls laid out on the table before her, and some rabbit-skin glue brewing for another project in a measuring cup nearby, Barrett seems as much a chef as she does a scholar or artist.

“I do use the kitchen,” she laughs, “and my family has just learned to ask, is this food or is this an art supply?”

She brushes a few strokes of color onto the sample of parchment. When the first layer dries, she adds another for intensity, and when that sets, the area is ready for details or highlights painted in another color or shell gold. “It’s that easy,” she says, her lively eyes smiling.

Since delving into her research of early painting methods, Barrett has also been demystifying the process for others, primarily at the Getty. She’s given demonstrations there for years, as well as lectures to docents and educators, and taught workshops for a more thorough, hands-on experience. The intent of such programs is to send visitors back to the exhibitions to view the original works with a deeper understanding of their creation. Many who attend the demonstrations and workshops are artists like Barrett, intrigued by the notion of creating works themselves, continuing a beautiful, highly refined practice made obsolete by more efficient, economical methods.

Embracing the tradition of illumination has gone against the grain ever since the cheaper alternative came around. Not everyone in the 15th century was ready to retire the practice either. Those who commissioned the works in the Getty show certainly helped keep the art alive. The duke of Urbino, in Italy, took his commitment one step further, relates curator Kren. “Into the 1480s, he would buy printed books, then have the texts copied by hand, and bring in his own illuminators to illustrate them. He was like those people now who insist on writing letters by hand and not by computer. He resisted the new technology.”

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‘Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe’

Where: The Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

When: Opens Tuesday. Hours: Tuesdays-Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.

Ends: Sept. 7

Price: Admission, free; parking, $5. Parking reservations required Tuesdays-Fridays before 4 p.m.

Contact: (310) 440-7300

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An illuminator’s essentials

The art of illumination begins with the most elemental of components: animal skin, scraped and stretched into thin sheets. Pigments of pounded minerals, some as rare and precious as the gold that surrounds them. Applied with tools evolved for this specialized form, the paints and gilding produced luminous results. Sylvana Barrett describes the materials and the process.

Gilding materials

Parchment: Soaked in a lime solution then scraped, stretched and rubbed with a pumice stone, animal skin becomes the manuscript’s surface.

Parchment scraps: Scraps, which remained after parchment was cut into pages, are made into strips and boiled to make glue.

Rabbit-skin glue (shown in dried form): An alternative to the parchment-scrap glue is made from the skin of rabbits. It is used in a preparatory layer under the gold leaf.

Bole: A gold-leaf adhesive made from a mix of rabbit-skin glue and red clay.

Red clay: Used in the making of bole to help give deeper tones to gold leaf. The smoothness of the clay gives burnished gold its mirror-like appearance.

Gilders knife and cushion: The blade and surface used for cutting gold leaf. The cushion is made of leather or a similar surface to which the gold won’t stick.

Gold leaf: Originally, gold coins were beaten into thin sheets and cut into squares. Today, gold is processed mechanically, producing much thinner (and harder to handle) sheets.

Tip: A fine brush whose hairs attract small pieces of gold leaf and allow them to be transferred to parchment. (The tip of the brush is touched to the gold.)

Burnishers: Finely polished agate stones attached to handles are used to rub the gold leaf, polishing the clay beneath and heightening the gold’s shine. (Originally, burnishers were made of dogs’ and wolves’ teeth.)

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Pigment materials

Gum Arabic (shown in rock form): Dried pieces of acacia tree gum are smashed, and mixed with water and dried pigment to make paint.

Egg: Egg whites are beaten to stiff peaks and left to sit overnight. The yellow liquid that forms under the whites is called “glair” and is used as a paint binder.

Cochineal bugs: Scraped from cacti and dried, then ground, the insects make a bright scarlet pigment (which is also used in lipstick and rouge today).

Dry pigments: The paint’s distinctive colors come from ground minerals, organic dyes extracted from plants, or chemically produced pigments.

Paints: Originally mixed in shells, the paint, made of pigment and binders, was a precursor to today’s watercolors.

Shell gold: Flakes of leftover gold are ground with gum arabic, gathered into hard cakes and used for painting details.

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The Parchment blooms with color

Step 1: Ink outlines

Step 2: Apply adhesives for the gold leaf

Step 3: Apply gold leaf

Step 4: Apply pigment;re-ink outlines