This book poses a challenge to a certain way of practicing art history, as a discipline that sometimes forgets that paintings are complex bodies and not only incorporeal images! Archival sources, case studies, and examination data that the author assembles and interacts with are not art historians’ usual reading, and they are even less common in university training in art history. Making and the sense of making are at the core of Michel Hochmann's research, which takes place in a dialogue between art historians, historians, restorers, and scientists. Such interaction leads to a deeper understanding of the artists’ practices and reassesses the clichés about Venetian technique, a myth for both artists and art theorists from the sixteenth century onward.

Chapters follow each other like the layers applied to a painting. In the first ones, on drawing, the author brings case studies, libri di spese, letters, recipe books, art theory, and infra-red reflectogram data face-to-face, demonstrating the variety of graphic practices (similes, sketches, studies, underdrawings, and cartoni) among Venetian painters. The conventional idea of drawing's marginal role is therefore deeply reconsidered. Similar observations can be made on chapters about supports and mediums. From the Quattrocento onward, artists used wood panels as well as canvas, depending on the dimensions and function of paintings. If in the Palazzo Ducale the Bellini chose teleri as substitutes for frescoes, their easel paintings and some large pale are mostly on wood. Later, Giorgione, Palma, or Lotto are just as irregular, even if artists, such as the young Titian, mostly chose simple thread canvases when they used tempera, looking for the homogeneous effects of wooden panels. The choice of support also had to do with cost or time constraints. Hochmann estimates the cost of canvas around 2% of the painting's total price. This could explain why Titian or Tintoretto worked often on composite canvases, sometimes made by scraps dissimilar in dimensions, thread, and typology: Titian's Triumph of Faith is made by canvases of various threads, while Tintoretto's Last Judgment, in the Madonna dell'Orto, is a patchwork of disparate scraps. Comparing sources and examination data, the book also undoes the story of the oil-painting-industry espionage by Antonello da Messina, who allegedly brought it into Venice. Indeed, though, oil and tempera were used since the early fifteenth century. Giovanni Bellini employs partial oil in the Transfiguration, but his Agony in the Garden is egg tempera. If in the Madonna of the Meadow he used both egg and oil for the transparencies, in the Pala di San Giobbe he achieves the corpose areas by adding oil and white lead to pigments, while the velature are tempera. This reveals how difficult it is to assess the transition from a “double technique” to oil. Painters seem to adapt techniques according to the implementation of artworks, the pictorial effects sought, and material and economic constraints. In the next chapter, inventories and cross-sectional data shed light not only on the nature and use of pigments but also on the role of painters, such as Titian or Tintoretto, in the commerce and the international network of Venetian vendicolori.

Aiming at understanding pittura tonale and unione, the final chapters consider how colorito implemented intense or blended colors, shadows, glazes, and impastos. If unione depends on the relation between colors and volumes, Giorgione and Titian resolved the problem through shadows, but without resorting to cangiantismo. Indeed, La Serenissima's painters created shadows suitable to local colors, mastering transparent glazes. From the 1530s onward, they also started using unusual blends, often darkening their colors. In unione, a key role is played by the brushwork: if in Giorgione, the young Titian, or Sebastiano del Piombo it defines forms, textures, and lights, Tintoretto gives an original turn to the technique, making the work quicker, as in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco's Brazen Serpent. Also, since Titian adopted visible brushwork as soon as the 1540s, Hochmann revives discussions on the (alleged) unfinished state of some his paintings. In the closing chapter, unione is taken into consideration as a function of colors’ gradation, shadows’ quality, and colored preparations: for Titian, Tintoretto, or Bassano, chiaroscuro and a darkened palette never meant a renouncement of color intensity, and Veronese's brilliant colorito did not lead to accepting chromatic dissonances. Finally, the specificity of the Venetian technique results more from the exaltation of materiality itself than from specific materials and mediums.

Among the book's many virtues, three must be emphasized: First, thanks to the author's perfect knowledge of Italian art history, the Venetian technique is placed in the wider perspective of artistic practices in Italy. Second, each chapter opens with a relevant overview of literature on the topic at hand. Last, but not least, the book is a wonderful, ceaseless mine of information!