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Whether an artwork reaches completion by careful application or was implemented directly by a hit-or-miss alla prima method (in which medium are applied in a single application) was once largely decided by the ideals and established techniques of its cultural tradition. For example, the medieval European illuminator’s painstaking procedure, by which a detailed linear pattern was gradually enriched with gold leaf and precious pigments, was contemporary with the Sung Chinese Zen practice of quick, calligraphic brush painting, following a peaceful period of spiritual self-preparation. However, the contemporary artist has decided the technique and working method most suited to his aims and temperament. In France in the 1880s, for instance, Seurat might be working in his studio on drawings, tone studies, and colour schemes in preparation for a large composition at the same time that, outdoors, Monet was endeavouring to capture the effects of afternoon light and atmosphere, while Cézanne analyzed the structure of the mountain Sainte-Victoire with deliberated brush strokes, laid as irrevocably as mosaic tesserae (small pieces, such as marble or tile).

The type of communication established between creator and patron, the site and subject matter of a painting commission, and the physical properties of the medium employed could also dictate working procedure. Peter Paul Rubens, for example, followed the business-like 17th-century custom of submitting a small oil sketch, or modella, for his client’s approval before creating a large-scale commission. Distinctive problems specific to mural painting, such as viewer eye level and the scale, architecture, and type of a building interior, had first to be solved in preliminary drawings and occasionally by using wax figurines or scale models of the interior. Scale working realizations are essential to the speed and precision of execution needed by quick-drying mediums, such as buon’ fresco (see below Fresco) on wet plaster, and acrylic resin on canvas. The drawings traditionally are divided with a frame of squares, or “squared-up,” for enlarging on the surface of the support. Some modern painters prefer to outline the enlargement of a sketch projected directly onto the support by epidiascope (a projector for images of both opaque and transparent objects). In Renaissance painters’ workshops, student assistants not only ground and mixed the pigments and prepared the supports and painting surfaces but often laid in the outlines and broad masses of the painting from the master’s design and studies.

The distinctive properties of its medium or the atmospheric conditions of a site may themselves preserve a painting. The wax solvent binder of encaustic paintings (in which after application, the paint is fixed by heat [see below Mediums], for example) both retains the intensity and tonality of the original colours and protects the surface from damp. And, while prehistoric rock paintings and buon’ frescoes are preserved by natural chemical action, the tempera pigments thought to be fixed only with water on many ancient Egyptian murals are conserved by the very dry climate and unvarying temperature of the tombs. It has, however, been customary to varnish oil paintings, both to protect the surface against damage by dust and handling and to restore the tonality lost when some darker pigments dry out into a higher key. Unfortunately, varnish will darken and yellow over time into the sometimes disastrously imitated “Old Masters’ mellow patina.” Once appreciated, this amber-gravy film is now usually removed to reveal the colours in their original intensity. Glass started to replace varnish towards the end of the 19th century, when painters wished to retain the fresh, luminous finish of pigments applied directly to a pure white ground. The air-conditioning and temperature-control systems of modern museums make varnishing and glazing unnecessary, except for older and more fragile exhibits.

The frames supporting early altarpieces, icons, and cassone panels (painted panels on the chest used for a bride’s household linen) were often structural parts of the support. With the establishment of portable easel pictures, ornate frames not only provided some protection from being stolen and damage but were considered an aesthetic addition to a painting, and frame making became a specialized craft. Gilded gesso moldings (made of plaster of paris and sizing that forms the surface for low relief) in exuberant presentations of fruit and flowers certainly appear almost an extension of the restless, exuberant design of a Baroque or Rococo painting. A hefty frame also provided a proscenium (in a theatre, the area between the orchestra and the curtain) in which the picture was separated from its immediate surroundings, thus adding to the window view illusion intended by the artist. Deep, ornate frames are unsuitable for many modern paintings, where the artist’s intention is for his creation to appear to advance toward the spectator rather than be viewed as if through a wall aperture. In modern Minimalist paintings, no effects of spatial illusionism are wanted; and, in order to emphasize the physical shape of the support itself and to emphasise its flatness, these abstract, geometrical designs are usually displayed without frames or are merely edged with thin protective strips of wood or metal.

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