Exploring Historical Painting on Copper: Techniques and Traditions

While we do not know why oil painting on copper enjoyed popularity from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, we may be able to provide some reasons based on historical evidence linked to artistic tradition in both the cultural and economic context of the period.

Concerning artistic tradition, paintings on copper may have arisen out of the practice of applying transparent oil glazes to metal sheets [1,2]. Still, the progress of enameling on copper or bronze in the fifteenth century may have influenced its development due to its widespread popularity [2].

The earliest literary evidence of oil glazes on metal is found in the eighth-century Lucca Manuscript, where a recipe describes how to make a glaze of oil and resin to be applied over tin foil in a technique known as ‘Pictura translucida.’ These glazes were colored yellow to give tin the appearance of gold leaf [1,2]—a kind of imitation gold. These stains were also used on different metals to imitate gilding, as recorded in later sources [2].

With the invention of printing, engraving, and etching became widely popular in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This meant copper plates were readily available to painters, some of whom were also etchers and engravers [1].

Economic factors may have also led to the popularity of copper as a painting support. Readily available copper plates meant affordable prices to artists [3]. Jørgen Wadum’s study of Antwerp coppersmiths and the relative costs of panels, artists’ materials, and paintings on copper revealed that prices for copper plates were roughly similar to those for oak panels of comparable size [4].

An ‘appreciation for the precious and the remarkable, the rare and unusual, the refined and exquisite’ developed among wealthy patrons in sixteenth-century Europe, reflected in cabinets of curiosities. This led to the proliferation of different supports for painting, such as ‘alabaster, amethyst, lapis lazuli, marble, quartz, slate…’ and, of course, metal. Logically, paintings on copper would also be seen as ‘rare and precious’ objects in art collections of that period [3].