Practice question · True or false
Jan van Eyck invented oil painting.
Hints
- The attribution comes from a sixteenth-century source.
- Oil binders were known well before; the Netherlandish painters developed their use.
Show the answer
False
Why
False. The attribution is Vasari's and is wrong: oil binders were in use before the fifteenth century. What van Eyck and his contemporaries did was develop the technique to a point that made oil the dominant European medium for five hundred years, a real achievement that the invention story obscures.
Practise Painting I: What the Medium Decides
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on Painting I: What the Medium Decides
- Sort each capability by the medium that permits it.
- Why did the arrival of oil paint change the way a picture could be composed, not just how it looked?
- Which follow from the chemistry of buon fresco?
- Complete the account of the media.
- Roughly how many days can an oil painting remain workable, allowing wet-into-wet blending?
- Arrange the stages of painting a buon fresco in order.
- Egg tempera and oil paint rely on identical pigments, yet produce entirely distinct visual styles. What…
- The pigments used in fresco, tempera and oil are largely the same; it is the binder that differs.