Documentary Sources
Technical art history often includes, or may be entirely focused on, the written record of materials, recipes, formulas, and processes used in the arts and crafts. The items in this section attempt to survey some portion of those primary sources.
- ARTECHNE Database.Systematic access to digitized recipes, books of secrets, artist manuals, and a few theoretical and philosophical art texts. Combines an earlier database focused on pigments with many texts from the Internet Archives and other sources. A growing database that currently is much stronger on pre-19th-century sources.
. - Mayer, Lance, and Gay Myers. American Painters on Technique: The Colonial Period to 1860, and American Painters on Technique: 1860-1945, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011 and 2013.A history of American painting focused tightly on the methods of painters. It is based upon descriptions of painting procedures from the artist's themselves, descriptions of their techniques by others, or manuals they were known to use. This survey is so closely documented that it may be used as an index to these primary sources.
. - Carlyle, Leslie, and Leslie Carlyle. The Artist’s Assistant: Oil Painting Instruction Manuals and Handbooks in Britain, 1800-1900, with Reference to Selected Eighteenth-Century Sources. Archetype Publications, 2001.A detailed analysis of hundreds of artists' manuals published in 19th-century Britain and selected examples from the 18th century. Each is annotated, all are categorized, and the majority of the text lists materials, processes, and issues that appear in multiple manuals.
. - Merrifield, Mary P., ed. Medieval and Renaissance Treatises on the Arts of Painting: Original Texts with English Translations. Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 1999.An anthology of significant treatises originally published in 1849 as Original Treatises Dating from the XIIth to XVIIIth Centuries on the Arts of Painting, in Oil, Miniature, Mosaic, and on Glass – a remarkable achievement for its time and still useful.
. - Lange-Berndt, Petra, ed. Materiality. Documents of Contemporary Art. The MIT Press, 2015.Significant theoretical or aesthetic writings of the last 100 years are selected and reprinted in this excellent series of books. The Materiality volume "looks at materials that obstruct, disrupt....re-examines the notion of "dematerialization," addresses materialist critiques....explores the vitality of substances, and the...hybrid zones of digital experimentation." Many thought provoking essays and interviews. The Colour volume, edited by David Batchelor, has some similar sources.
Penn State’s Special Collections Library has many examples of artists’ manuals.