Page 328 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
the recurrent use of important white elements in many paintings of the classic period, where it was used as a colour in its own right, clearly hovering in front of the ground.”62 The example of the latter can be seen in image 12.
12. Mark Rothko, No. 18, 1951, oil on canvas, 207 x 170.5 cm (81.1⁄2 x 67.1/8), Munson – Williams-Procor Institute Museum of Art, Utica, New York.
Speaking strictly in terms of the procedure of painting, the fact that in his classic pe- riod Rothko experimented with the effect caused by the varied percentage of white in his hues, is a phenomenon evidently analogous to fresco, as well as egg tempera technique of Byzantine painting, where in both cases volume is rendered through the gradual add- ing of white into each of the succeeding layers of the applied colour-mixture, and where
62 John Gage, “Rothko: Color as Subject,” in Mark Rothko, ed. Jeffrey Weiss (Washington: National Gallery of Art, in association with New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 250.
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