Clay ground in paintings:from Northern to Southern Europe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The use of clay grounds containing quartz was first observed in the Netherlands in artworks from Rembrandt’s workshop after 1640 [1, 2]. In addition, contemporary written sources outside the Netherlands mention this practice in Italy and Spain [2]. However, the reason for using clay as a constituent in paintings has still not been much investigated, neither with regard to the processing nor the trade of the material. Did it give a particular colour/structure in order to achieve a specific final effect of the painted surface? Was clay cheaper than chalk, calcium sulphate or earth pigments? Did it give more flexibility to the painting support? Was it connected to the tile industry? Was it a waste/reuse from the ceramic production? <br/>To better understand the role of clay ground as a material and its influence on painting techniques, a number of Danish and Italian 17th century paintings from the Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK) collection were surveyed by means of SEM-EDX analyses, FTIR and Raman spectroscopy in order to characterize the materials employed in the red ground layers. The results indicate that these Danish and Italian grounds consist mainly of clay and quartz mixed with iron-based compounds. The investigation is demonstrating how widespread the use was of clays as constituent in paintings when comparing the analytical results performed on artworks from Northern and Southern Europe.<br/>This preliminary study will lead to further research focused on the link between artistic schools of the period, the transmission of technology and knowledge of employing this type of clay grounds and, possibly, tracing the origin of the raw materials employed in the grounds. <br/><br/>[1] K. M. Groen, ArtMatters - Netherlands Technical Studies in Art, 3, 2005, 138-154. Waanders, Zwolle.<br/>[2] K. M. Groen, "Grounds in Rembrandt´s workshop and in paintings by his contemporaries", in E. van de Wetering et al. A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, 2011, 318-334 + 660-677. Springer, Dordrecht<br/>
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".