Cabinet painting
A small, highly-detailed painting kept in cabinets for the pleasure of a host and their guests. The cabinet of curiosities – literally, cabinets filled with oddities collected by their owners – is an extension of the same idea, such that all sorts of items, not just paintings, are stored in the cabinet. Some items so stored were very odd indeed: the diarist Samuel Pepys kept a bladder stone he had had removed as a young man inside his cabinet, for the presumed joy and delight of his guests. For cabinet painting in the sense of painting the box itself, see cassone.
Calligraphy
The aesthetics of writing (in Greek, it literally means ‘beautiful script’). In Western and Central Europe, calligraphy was based upon Latin script and brought to a high level of craftsmanship in religious manuscripts; though the Gutenberg Press, combined with scholars grumbling that they could not read the older scripts, led to a decline in handwriting for its own sake. The most remarkable calligraphy, however, is found in Asia: the highpoint of Arabic calligraphy generally being held as the Ottoman period; while in South and East Asia calligraphy is still a vibrant and experimental area. Mayan and Ethiopian calligraphy are also fascinating areas to explore.
Camera Lucida
Invented by Richard Hooke around 1674, this device deploys a prism to reflect an image onto a sheet of paper. By positioning the prism and magnifying lenses, the size of the image can be reduced and increased. During the late Regency and Victorian periods silhouette artists were in demand to reflect the profile of a sitter onto paper, trace around its edge, and present the resulting drawing as a silhouette portrait. Amateurs also traced such portraits, as did Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. See also camera obscura.
Camera Obscura
While the camera lucida merges an image of a scene and the artist’s hand on paper for tracing, the camera obscura projects a realtime image through a small pinhole (or lens) into a darkened room. It is much larger than the lucida, and while it is older technology (it was probably first constructed by Leone Battista Alberti, d. 1472), it is still in occasional use today.
Canvas board
A heavy cardboard with a cotton or linen canvas glued to one side, its edges folded over to the back. The face is primed in the same manner as an academy board. See also Bristol board.
Carpenter’s pencil
A flat, graphite pencil, with which the artist may draw both thick and thin lines.
Cartoon
A full-size study produced on paper, in preparation for another work. Cartoons can be very valuable in their own right: e.g. the Raphael Cartoons, a series of works by Raphael depicting seven New Testament scenes.
Casein
A milk protein used as a binder. Casein is only water-soluble in the presence of an alkali, thus casein paints once dry are waterproof. It has a long history: a type of milk curd glue was used by the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.
Cassone
Italian for ‘(marriage) coffer’: a box, usually commissioned by the bride’s father, into which the couple’s future possessions were to be placed. During the Renaissance period the panels were often painted, sometimes at great expense; though towards the end of the 15th century the fashion changed towards oak chests which were carved rather than painted.
Ceramic
A small, clay, heat-hardened object. Artists can paint upon them with practically any medium.
Chalk
Used as a drawing material on a dark-tinted paper, or for heightening a wash or pen and ink drawing.
Charcoal
Used in early cave-paintings, Roman artworks, and indeed every period of art history, charcoal remains a popular medium for preliminary drawings. Charcoal is made from heating wood in an environment without oxygen, and the wood used will determine the qualities of the charcoal stick: willow and beech produce brittle sticks, while vine twigs are the softest and blackest. The charcoal is applied to the paper directly, and can then be manipulated with a tortillon, a hog brush, a piece of rag, a plastic rubber, or just your fingertip. A fixative will prevent charcoal smudging.
Chiaroscuro
The contrasting use of light and shadow: artists famous for their use of chiaroscuro include Leonardo, Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Compare this with tenebrism.
Cinquecento
Italian for the 16th century, and referring to the art produced during that period.
Circle of
A painting described as belonging to ‘the circle of’ an artist was painted in the lifetime of that named artist, by someone who imitated their style. While it is pleasant to think that the named and unnamed artist were associated, the work could have been painted by anyone who happened to be alive at the time.
Claude Glass
A small, blackened convex mirror: convex to reduce the tonal range of the scene, and blackened to reflect only the main masses of the subject. The artist sits facing away from the chosen scene and holds the Glass in front of him so that he can look over his shoulder. It is named after Claude Lorrain (1600-82, who is also said to have devised it); the Glass was popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, and is sometimes still used today.
Cleaning
Part of the restoration work that goes into paintings. Cleaning is simply that: removing the dirt that accumulates through years of dust, cigarette smoke, and the like. The method of cleaning will depend on the medium of the painting, and requires some specialist knowledge: theoretically, for example, a dampened cloth could safely clean oil painting as oil and water do not mix; however, an individual artist might have mixed his paints with elements more susceptible to the presence of water. Knowledge the way the artist prepared his materials is invaluable in cleaning paintings safely.
Cleavage
Or, flaking, blistering, scaling: this is where the paint or ground is ‘lifting’ (separating) from the canvas. It can be fixed by lining.
Collage
Named after ‘papier collé’ or ‘pasted paper’, collages are art works put together with any combination of materials such as paper, card, textiles, wood and metal fragments, and fur. Compare mixed media.
Colour theory
A whole area of study (indeed, science) by itself, this is the theory of how colours complement each other, and the effects that can be obtained by mixing them. Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810) was the first extended treatise on the subject, but Leonardo’s notebooks contain comments which would now be understood to fall under colour theory. Note that while some theorists will argue in terms of what a combination of colours should be able to achieve, the most useful work on the subject is based on what imperfect colour pigments actually produce. A colour wheel depicts a range of colours in a ring, with colours beside each other being analogous (weakly contrasting, such as blue and purple) while complimentary colours are opposite each other on the wheel (strongly contrasting, such as blue and orange). Heraldry may be taken as including a colour theory of sorts, in the limited sense that it provides rules on which colours should be juxtaposed and which should not.
Concrete Art
Or non-objective art: artwork made up of geometric motifs.
Conservation
To take steps to preserve a painting. It is a word often used interchangeably with restoration.
Consolidation
A conservation and restoration technique where loose paint is secured with adhesive.
Conté Crayon
First developed by Nicholas-Jacques Conté, they are grease-free sticks of a compressed compound of binder and pigment; the colours being sanguine, sepia and black.
Copy
Unlike a print (which is simply a facsimile) a copy is an accurate rendering of a particular work, in the same medium as the original. If the copy is by the same artist who painted the original (so that they could sell the same image multiple times) it is instead called a replica. Copies of important works will have considerable value if the original painting is lost.
Coquille Board
Or stipple board: drawing paper with a pebbled texture, so that sweeping a soft crayon (coquille) across it quickly and easily produces an effect that looks like stippling. It is used especially by cartoonists.
Cradling
Where the support for a painting is a piece of panel board, this conservation and restoration technique makes use of wood latticework, which is applied to the back of the panel to prevent warping. Before the latticework is applied, the panel is usually made thinner.
Cross-hatching
Two sets of parallel lines drawn in pen or pencil: first in one direction and then across them in the other (hence ‘cross-hatch’); the more dense the hatching, the darker the tone. The same tonal effect can be achieved by using a graver to draw the lines when engraving on wood.