 Now I want to discuss Dirk Bautz, because he's a very interesting Netherlandish artist. He lived and worked in the city of Louvain, and is documented there between about 1457 and 75, but he originally appears to have come from the Netherlandish city of Harlem, which is far to the north near Amsterdam. Bautz is known for producing several altarpieces, and he's also known for a number of paintings that show the Madonna and Child. And we're going to be looking at three that have an almost identical pose with the Virgin and Child, and we'll be talking about his technique, and in particular his use of ultramarine blue pigment derived from lapis lazuli, and some of the ways in which he approached his painting method in order to save money and to maximize the effect of that ultramarine. And some of those have sort of backfired today, hundreds of years later, some of the underpainting in his less expensive efforts has darkened and obscured the use of the ultramarine. I just want to quickly point out the distant landscape behind the Virgin. This appears to show some of the church towers in Louvain, and sometimes we have recognizable landscapes like this from painters. Sometimes they simply put in a fantasy landscape, and maybe that's meant to drive our historians crazy. I don't know. Now we're looking at a detail from the other side of the painting, and I want you to particularly notice this cloth of honor that hangs behind the Virgin. A cloth of honor is an early medieval convention used to distinguish an important person. It was generally hung behind the thrones of kings to mark their importance. And you can see lots of examples in medieval manuscript illuminations as far back as at least the year 1000. By the 12th century, a rich cloth of honor would be used to mark the most important person in a painting. And by the 15th century, like the example we have here, this convention had long been in use for religious figures like the Virgin Mary and for Christ. The elaborate silk brocade that you see behind the Virgin in this painting is a painted version of what was the most expensive and desirable types of cloth in Renaissance Europe. This is the actual cloth would have been made of silk with actual metallic threads beaten from gold and silver woven into it. And because of sumptuary laws that legislated what different people of different classes were allowed to own and wear, cloth like this was generally limited just for royalty, high-ranking churchmen and the very wealthiest people. So it is a signal immediately to someone that this is a person of incredible importance. And similarly, you see the same type of cloth being used as a cushion for the baby Jesus. In order to create the pattern for this brocade cloth behind the Virgin and also the cloth on the cushion for Christ, bouts probably would have used the pouncing technique that we discussed when we were looking at ochre pigments. What you would do is of course take ground pigment in this example. They're showing graphite or charcoal. And you would put it into a little bag and sort of smack it up against a drawing that had been pierced. And you're seeing here in my example an inscription done in text. And sometimes it's possible to identify particular artists by the brocade pattern that they used. And really elaborate brocade patterns that could be reproduced in paintings would be passed down from master to apprentice or from father to son left in wills. And so you can trace different workshops by the unique use of a particular brocade pattern. Now I want to discuss Dirk Bout and more of his painting techniques and the way that they relate to Lapis Lazuli. Conservators at the National Gallery in London found that like many other painters of his day, Dirk Bout tended to be very sparing when he used ultramarine blue. And I'm showing you here a detail in which I played around with the brightness level a little bit so that you can see the blue of the Virgin's mantle a little bit more clearly. You'll notice that in the painting itself, which I haven't tickered with in Photoshop, that her mantle appears to be an incredibly deep blue and not that vibrant electric ultramarine that we associate with the pigment derived from Lapis Lazuli. And there's a reason for that. And that is because Dirk Bout did his underpainting using a much less expensive pigment and that is azurite. Now it was less expensive than Lapis Lazuli, but it was still expensive. Azurite also had to be imported. It had to be crushed and purified, but it was less expensive. The azurite was used in the underpainting and it was meant to lay in the basic blue tones of the robe. And then on top, Dirk Bout applied a thick glaze of ultramarine. The problem is that azurite reacted with the linseed oil that was used to mix the pigment into paint. And it ended up turning black over time, turns to sort of a deep greenish black. So Bout, of course, when he did this, didn't realize what the problem would be. And he was doing this in a very cost-effective way in order to make it look as if the entire robe had been painted just with ultramarine rather than just doing the top layer. And this is a technique that numerous artists had used. Since azurite discolors gradually over time, and you can see that here in this section from that very painting, the layer there that looks sort of greenish blue and black all together, that's the azurite that has reacted with the linseed oil and the linseed oil is showing up as gold. The translucent layer of ultramarine is up on top of that. And then the white layer down at the bottom, that's the ground that the panel was originally painted with. So Bout probably had no idea this was going to happen. And probably would have avoided having this happen. But this is something that we see in a number of works. And again, it's a sign of the artist simply being a good businessman. They needed to live after all. I want to discuss a little bit more of Bout's work because he was the consummate businessman. What you're looking at here is a work that was made about five to ten years before the work we just looked at. And it's a fairly small painting, just eight and a half inches high. You might notice that there's really no background at all. And that incredible dark blue in the Virgin's robe is likely an indication that with this painting also, that Dirk Bout's was using underpainting in Azurite. This is a painting that is based on a famous type of Byzantine icon. Icons tended to be classified in types. And this particular one is called the Sweetly Kissing Madonna or Glycopelusa. Byzantine icons were incredibly important in Western art. They had a tremendous impact on the Western art market as early as the early medieval period, about the 10th century and even earlier. And when the Crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204, they brought back lots of icons. And there were trade routes that continually brought works of art from the Byzantine East into Western markets. And so here, Dirk Bout is responding to the popularity of icons and their poses and this intimacy between mother and child and creating his own version. We know from his use of Azurite as an underpainting pigment for ultramarine that Dirk Bout was quite the businessman and definitely made sure that he practices his work very frugally. And here we're going to see another example of Dirk Bout as a businessman. Here are three paintings, the one that we looked at, which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on the left. And then two copies in San Francisco and in Florence. And the two copies were made in Bout's workshop, but most likely by his assistants, according to conservation reports. These were probably, they're clearly based on the New York painting. And it's very likely that the workshop artists could have used the exact same cartoon and pounced it onto their panels in order to transfer that design. Certainly they were looking very, very closely at Bout's original. And I also want you to notice that works like this could be perhaps made to order for patrons with differing demands and differing amounts of money to spend. So the work from in the middle in San Francisco has a really elaborate cloth of honor in the background. The Virgin has a rich red robe and a bit less ultramarine blue on her, although her gown is quite rich. And so perhaps the patron here wanted to pay a little bit more in order to get a richer looking painting with the brocade. The one on the right in Florence looks like it's possible that the patron didn't have quite as much money to spend on ultramarine, because what we see here appears to just be azurite that has decayed to that sort of greenish blackish tone. And we don't have any of that sort of rich resonance of bright ultramarine blue on top. So there are a number of different considerations here. And we have to remember that artists had to make a living. They were businessmen and businesswomen. And they would also use the people in their shops, their apprentices and their assistants in order to economize on labor. Oftentimes a painting contract will stipulate that the principal faces have to be done by the master himself because people knew that assistants and apprentices might be working on pieces like this. So what I want you to take away from this is the fact that when you're talking about expensive pigments like lapis lazuli, you have to take that expense into account. We know that bright intense blue is an indicator of the most important figure in a painting. But there are also shades to that blue that can help us understand the way in which the artist navigated the economics of that very expensive color blue.