Practice question · Multiple choice
Why did the arrival of oil paint change the way a picture could be composed, not just how it looked?
Hints
- Ask what becomes possible when you can change the picture for weeks.
- Slow drying changes when the design has to be finalised.
Show the answer
B. A medium revisable over weeks lets a painting be developed rather than executed from a settled design
Why
Because it moved the design decisions into the painting. Tempera dries in minutes and requires a settled cartoon transferred to the panel; oil can be reworked for weeks, so the composition can be discovered on the support. That is a change in the practice of making pictures, not merely in their surface.
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.
- Jan van Eyck invented oil painting.
- 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.