Michael Shamansky, Bookseller Inc.
Importer of European Publications in the Fine Arts
P.O. Box 3904, Kingston, New York 12402 Phone: 845-331-8519 Email: mshamans@artbooks.com

Item Number: 112995
Title: Mediaeval Painters' Materials and Techniques: The Montpellier Liber diversarum arcium
Author: Clarke, Mark
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9781904982647
Description: London: Archetype, 2011. 25cm., pbk., 352pp., 20 color plates. Summary: The anonymous Montpellier Liber diversarum arcium (‘Book of Various Arts’) contains the most complete set of instructions in the craft of medieval painting to have survived to the present day. Its comprehensive summary of the state of the art of painting in the workshops of the fourteenth century will be of great interest to art historians, conservators and historians of artists’ technology. This long-overlooked manuscript provides a complete practical painting course: drawing, water-based tempera, oil and fresco. It includes painting on manuscripts, panels, sculptures and walls, but also painting on glass and ceramics. Instructions are given for the preparation of materials such as pigments and media, and also for their application and modelling, as well as for gilding and other useful techniques. The range of knowledge displayed is remarkable with nearly six hundred recipes, two-thirds of which are unique to this manuscript. Furthermore it demonstrates that when the van Eycks and their contemporaries transformed painting in the fifteenth century, they did so using materials and techniques of oil painting that already existed. This volume contains the first ever published translation of the Liber diversarum arcium together with an extensive technical and historical commentary.

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Michael Shamansky, Bookseller Inc.
P.O. Box 3904, Kingston, New York 12402 US
Phone: 845-331-8519
Fax: 845-331-0852
Email: michael@artbooks.com

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