ABSTRACT
Artists' contracts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are frequently very precise in their stipulations, indicating not only the responsibilities of the artist, but also the subject matter, proposed design and overall appearance of the work. The description may be so precise that the colours of the garments of the principal figures and other decorative features are given. The 1434 contract for the polychromy and painting of an altarpiece for the Franciscan Church in Ghent, for example, required the painter, Saladijn de Stoevere, to depict the Virgin in a robe of gold cloth, lined with fine 'aijsuere' (azure) and glazed with a crimson lake pigment, 'sinopere'.1 As this example shows, it is also common for the use of certain materials, or particular grades of those materials, to be specified. Frequently the concern of the patron commission ing the work of art was with the gilding: the use of gold, silver, or the composite leaf made by beating gold and silver together and known by such names as oro di meta, Zwischgold and or parti, and whether the leaf was to be burnished or not. Even for a conventional Florentine painted altarpiece, such as Sandro Botticelli's Virgin and Child with Saints John the Evangelist and John the Baptist (Berlin, Staatliche Museen), painted in 1483 for the Bardi Chapel, S. Spirito, the cost of gilding was a sizable proportion of the total expen diture. Of the 75 fiorini larghi d'oro in oro due to the artist, 38 florins were for the gold and gilding of the altarpiece and probably its frame; 2 florins were for the blue pigment used. The remaining 35 florins were for the painter's labour.2
