Research Summary

This project aims to build a body of knowledge that will enhance the understanding of the materials and production methodologies applied in the use of painter’s smalt, with a special focus on its relation, similarities, and differences to cobalt-containing blue glassy materials such as enamels. By combining compositional analysis of historical smalts in paintings with the analysis of contemporaneous blue enamels, insight will be gained into the material overlap and transfer of knowledge between these two crafts. Critical analysis of written sources and the reproduction of historical recipes will provide the necessary context to the analyses and provide information imperative to understand why an artist would pick one material over the other for specific use cases. 

Furthermore, these reconstructions will provide the necessary material basis for oil paint mock-ups with different compositions to better understand the original appearance of smalt-containing paint layers, that nowadays have mostly degraded into a murky brown.