Using a Venetian Painting Technique: How to Capture Renaissance Light and Colour

Ever wondered how artists like Titian or Tintoretto achieved that glowing, luminous quality in their paintings? If you're like me, you have for a long time. After a lot of reading, looking at paintings and watching documentaries I found that the secret lies in the Venetian School’s layered approach - a process that combines warm underpainting, cool glazes, and a masterful handling of light.

In this tutorial on using a Venetian painting technique, I want to walk you through how I recreated a Venetian Renaissance oil painting - 'The Miracle of the Slave' by Tintoretto, painted 1548, step by step. This traditional method really helped with my understanding of building up highly saturated colours slowly, then desaturating them, then pushing them in a different colour direction layer by layer. I decided to paint it much smaller than the original (which is huge - 416cm x 544cm) on A3 so I had to avoid very small details that are impossible to paint on such a small scale, which is always good when studying colour I've found. I hope it helps you in your own painting!

Tools

• Easel

• Palette

• Two palette knives

• Palette dipper

• Hog’s hair brushes

  
  

Materials

• Graphite and paper

• Canvas (Venetian red primed)

• Turpentine (sansodor)

• Oil paints:

  • Lead white (which I replaced with flake white hue)

  • Chrome yellow

  • Yellow ochre

  • Red ochre

  • Rose madder

  • Burnt sienna

  • Ultramarine blue

  • Viridian green

  • Bone black (which I replaced with ivory black)

See my blog post on oil painting tools and materials for more info on where to buy these materials and tools.

Studio Setup

For best results, work in a studio with a north-facing window. This ensures consistent, indirect natural light without sharp changes throughout the day - a principle studio painters have relied on for centuries. I know this is a luxury these days, so a good neutral LED studio light can really help if don't have a north facing window - blog post on studio lighting to come...

Step-by-Step: Venetian Painting Technique

1. Thumbnail Sketches

According to my research, Tintoretto would've started with small thumbnail sized sketches. These quick studies help to explore compositions and find one that feels dynamic and balanced. This isn't an approach confined to the Venetian Renaissance, this is still a very valid way of exploring ideas now amongst fine artists and artists in the entertainment industry like concept artists. I've recreated how I think he would've sketched below:

2. Transfer the Drawing

Once he'd chosen a composition, he would've used chalk to lightly transfer the sketch onto a red primed canvas. The warmth of the ground will glow through later layers, enriching the final colour. Here's my recreation:

3. Define the Lights

Using white chalk, I read that he began marking out the light areas of the composition in bold, simple shapes. I thought of this as the first pass at structuring value.

4. Grisaille (but it's pinks and not grey) Underpainting

Over the chalk, he painted in the lights using white paint thinned with turpentine. It would not have been about painting details yet - instead, aiming for a high-contrast, almost overexposed photograph look. See me break this down in more detail in my post on glazing.

5. Glazing the Colours

I applied transparent layers of colour allowing the light underpainting to shine through in certain areas. Each glaze subtly alters the hue and value, creating that Venetian Renaissance look of depth and luminosity. I continued with many layers until I was happy with the colours and values.

If you’re interested in seeing how these Venetian principles connect to other traditions - from Rubens’ to Rockwell - you can explore my Master Copies in the artwork page of my website, underneath prints, cards and commissions, shown below. Each painting was executed using the same materials and historical methods practiced by the original masters, or as close as possible with modern equipment and materials.

Further Research

For more on Venetian techniques, see:

• Tom Keating on Painters – Titian

  
  

I’ve shared here what I’ve learned and observed about Tintoretto in this post, but I certainly don’t claim to know everything - there’s always more to discover, and it’s very possible I’ve got parts wrong or missed some details. If you’ve come across other research, insights, or techniques about Tintoretto’s methods, I’d love for you to share them in the comments. I'd love to make this a space where we can collectively explore and piece together a clearer picture of how Tintoretto and other artists worked. Your contributions could help all of us better understand and appreciate our favourite painters.

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