 In this case study, we're going to be discussing Sinopea, or the plural, that's the plural. The singular is Sinopea, and this is a term that is based on Sinopel, and that is the name for a Turkish ochre pigment that comes from a particular region of Turkey. And as you can see on these two images, this is a reddish brown ochre pigment, and the way it was used was to transfer drawings for wall paintings onto walls. So an artist would initially come up with a large pencil or charcoal drawing on a piece of paper, and then he or she would punch holes all along the major contour lines of that sketch or drawing, this is usually called a cartoon, and then that cartoon would be laid up against the roughly plastered wall where it was going to be painted and pounced, and so what they would do is they would take this ground Sinopel pigment and place it into like a muslin bag, a fairly, not a very tightly woven bag, but one with kind of a loose wave, a little bit like a cheesecloth, and so you would take that and kind of use it like a powder puff up against the wall, sort of padding it through those holes, and you would end up with the general outlines, kind of like a dotted line outline, and then as the artist you would go back in with just a piece of chalk or pastel made from this same Sinopel pigment, and you would draw directly on the wall and work out your overall composition. So what you're looking at here are two views of a Sinopia showing the Virgin Mary as part of an enunciation scene. You can see on the left she's kind of raising her hand to her chest in a gesture of surprise. Her eyes are looking upward as the angel approaches, and then on the right I'm showing you some of the details of her drapery, and you can see how the artist here has worked out some of the areas of light and shadow. All of the works that I'm showing you here are from a museum in Pisa called the Museum of the Sinopia, and these are under drawings that had the wall paintings above them, the frescoes actually detached from them as part of a restoration of the Camposanto, which is this enormous covered graveyard building next to the cathedral and the leaning tower of Pisa in the old part of Pisa. What happened is the Camposanto had been decorated throughout with really amazing fresco paintings that are some of them are about two or even three stories high, and in World War II, this area of the city was damaged terribly, particularly the Camposanto, and so a lot of these paintings fell off of the walls, and so what they did is they conserved the paintings by detaching the frescoes from the paintings underneath, the under paintings and drawings underneath them, and they ended up putting all of those under drawings, the Sinopia, into a separate museum, and that's actually where you go buy your tickets in Pisa. It's an area that a lot of people tend to ignore because they're so busy wanting to climb the tower, but it's a really rewarding place to go. What we're seeing here is a scene from an Old Testament story, and what I want you to particularly notice here is not so much what's going on in the action, but the way that the artist here has laid out their entire perspectival scheme, their way of showing illusionistic space on this particular Sinopia, and so you can see there's a vanishing point right about at the mid-right of this slide, and then you have a series of diagonals that are extending from there that tend to give us that sense of space receding into the distance, and then the figures are drawn against this so that they're in the proper size range to correspond with their settings. This is my photograph of one of the more spectacular sets of frescoes in the Camposanto in Pisa. There is a series of frescoes showing the Last Judgment and Heaven and Hell, and here we're seeing Jesus and the Virgin Mary in Throne Up Above in Heaven, and then they're watching with the 12 apostles as the Archangel Michael, who's sort of down at the middle of the center, divides the dead into those who are going to Heaven and those who are going to Hell, and of course, those who are going to Heaven are the ones on Christ's right, which is our left. You'll notice that all of those people look relatively happy, and the ones who are going to Hell are the ones on our right, which is Christ's left, and there's still some separating going on. There's one angel who's sort of pulling a guy by his hair and pointing to the fact that he needs to go to the bad side, and similarly, there's another angel leading someone over to the heavenly side. Take a look at the figures down on the lower right corner because we're going to look at some of the synope for them in the moment. Here's a close-up of the area that I'm going to discuss, and it's a wonderfully dramatic scene with lots of very pensive and uncomfortable-looking women, some screaming, some crying, but all of them sort of struggling against the knowledge that they're going to be sent into Hell. I want you to also notice that not only was ochre used in the underdrawings for these frescoes, it was also used extensively in the frescoes themselves. The blonde hair of the women is most likely yellow ochre, and the reaching arms of the demons that you see grabbing some of the figures at the far right, those are probably made from ochre. There are other pigments as well, but one of the great advantages of ochre was that it was inexpensive, it was stable, it could be used in wall paintings without reacting to the plaster, because here you're using a fresco technique where you're covering this wall that has the drawing on it on the rough plaster, then with a finer layer of really nice plaster, it gets to sort of a not quite dry stage where it has sort of a leathery texture, and that's when you start to paint on it using your water-based paints, and what happens is that, of course, the water reacts with the plaster and the pigment gets sort of absorbed into the wall and becomes part of the wall, and that is part of what makes wall paintings like this so stable. Certain pigments could not be absorbed well, including a number of the blues, and you'll notice that there's a lot of loss of blue on this particular fresco, a lot of the mineral-based blues didn't work well with plaster, but ochre was one of those reliable pigments that could work for a lot of different things, and so it was a very affordable way for a painter to work. Here, the synopia for that scene that we were just looking at is nearly as exciting as the scene itself. We've zoomed in on some of the women, and you can see that the horrible talents of the demons that are grabbing them from behind, and you can also see that the painter in this case has really felt the need to work out a lot of the ways that the folds in the drapery work, and so what he or she did in this case was actually shade in with more than just the lines of the Sinopel sort of reddish tone. There's also some yellow ochre in here as well, and some deeper colors to really kind of figure out how all of those folds are going to work. Fresco is one of those mediums where you have to work relatively quickly, and you have to kind of set aside an area to cover with this new plaster that is just enough for you to get done before it dries. You don't want to put too much plaster down and run the risk of running out of time before the plaster dries. It's much less forgiving than a lot of other ways to paint, so hence the need to do such a detailed underdrawing. The other thing that I think is so fascinating about drawings, and of course we're looking at an even closer view of that one woman who's being pulled, is that there's sort of a rawness and an energy to them that you don't necessarily get in the final version. Sometimes sketches can be more interesting than finished perfect pictures because you get a glimpse of the artist's thought process. You can see for example on the right how some of the talons and claws of the demons might have changed a little bit, and you can see changes in facial placements, in hairstyles, and so on. I urge you someday to go to Pisa and see this amazing museum of the Sinopeia.