Titian and technique | Paintings | The National Gallery, London

Find out about Titian's techniques, his careful planning, and his alterations and deliberations. National Gallery restorer Jill Dunkerton explains how X-rays can reveal the artist's working practice. Featuring Titian's painting 'The Tribute Money'.

Read about Titian and view all of his works at the National Gallery, London:
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/art...

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Closed Caption:

petition is not just to in his later
career
a very long time with paintings or these
they were in studio for a very long time
in his early paintings we don't know how
fast he was I think the actual process
of laying on the paint wasn't
necessarily slow but because he made all
these alterations and he seems always to
have made them on top of dry paint he
didn't like working with a lot of wet in
wet painting
they must have been sitting around for
quite a time while he was allowing the
paint dry
he sketched his pictures with bold
strokes made with brushes laden with
colors
he then used to turn the picture to the
wall and leave it there sometimes for
several months without looking at it
when taking the picture up again he
would examine it with the utmost rigour
as if it were his mortal enemy and then
set about correcting it if in an x-ray
you see a lot of white color it could
just mean that he's painted something
very very solid and dense for example
white drapery and so there's lots of
white but on the whole way you do have
an alteration you tend to see extra
thicknesses of white and they can jump
after to as being very obviously an area
where changes have happened in the case
of the painting of the head of the
Pharisee everything seems to have come
right straight away and so as a result
in the x-ray it's in very very dark
shadowy shape that's because there's
very little lead waitting the paint now
of course this is a figure in shadow and
so he's not going to have as much let
white his complexion isn't going to be
as fair
by contrast the head of Christ is this
extraordinary mass of white because
there's so much led white as a result of
the alterations originally Christ seems
to have been painted with his head
more inclined tilted towards the
Pharisee rather as if he's listening to
him
perhaps a more human way but edition
decided that he wanted to make his
Christ more imposing and so he shipped
the head to his present upright position
that's the back the present head that we
see there