Page - 252 - in Europäische Bild- und Buchkultur im 13. Jahrhundert

252 stElla panayotoVa combine azurite and lead white with light brown and grey-green modelling. The multiple layers, thickly applied with directional brushstrokes create a highly textu- red effect, as if the artist were sculpting with paint. The images of Christ and St Peter echo the so-called Byzantine flesh painting technique.29 It involved applying an underlayer of green earth, leaving parts of it visible as shadows, covering the rest with a flesh-tone mixture and modelling this with further shading and highlights. Masterful examples feature alongside free in- terpretations in a Psalter made in Breslau c. 1260‒1265.30 At least seven artists were recruited from Saxony, Thuringia, Franconia and Bohemia to work on it alongside a Venetian painter-illuminator, the Master of Giovanni da Gaibana. His exquisite faces have a base of green earth; a smoothly blended pink flesh tone (lead white and vermilion); features outlined in red (earth or organic) and moderated with carbon black, brown earth and lead white; vermilion shading and lead white highlights (pl. 6b). The Central European artists followed the same steps, but replaced the green earth underlayer with ultramarine or indigo and did not blend the layers into smooth complexions (pl. 6d). These and other variations in palette, technique, style and iconography indicate that the Breslau Psalter was illuminated by independent artists, not workshop members. The painting of flesh could be key to an artist’s signature style. The varying pig- ments and methods employed across thirteenth-century Europe indicate that there was neither an established cannon nor a linear evolution in flesh painting. 29 Nancy Turner: ‘Incarnation’ Illuminated. In: Panayotova, Colour (cit. n. 4), pp. 271‒279. 30 Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 36‒1950; www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/illumina- ted/. Stella Panayotova / Nigel Morgan / Paola Ricciardi: The Breslau Psalter. Luzern 2018. pl. 6: Photomicroscopy details of flesh tones in Fitzwilliam Muse- um, MS 12, fol. 12r, Peterborough, c. 1220–1225 (a); MS McClean 201.9a, Umbria, c. 1250–1275 (c); MS 36–1950, 23v (b), 86r (d) a b c d