impasto

Impasto comes from the Italian verb impastare (to make into a paste, to knead, to mix into a dough), from in- (into) and pasta (paste, dough) from Late Latin pasta (dough) — the same word that gives English 'pasta' and 'paste.' The past participle impasto names the state of paint that has been kneaded or applied thickly enough to have the texture of dough or paste: not spread thinly and evenly across the canvas surface, but pushed onto it in ridges, furrows, and peaks that preserve the movement of the brush or knife. In Italian, impasto refers generally to the blending of ingredients into a mixture, and it is used in cooking as well as painting — an impasto in a kitchen is the mixing of flour, water, and other ingredients into dough. The word entered English art criticism in the eighteenth century as a technical term for the physical texture of thickly applied oil paint.

Impasto emerged as a significant technique as oil painting developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, because oil paint — unlike tempera or fresco — could be built up in thick layers without cracking. The physical properties of oil allowed painters to apply paint so heavily that the result was a sculptural object as much as a pictorial one. Titian was among the first to exploit impasto systematically, using a palette knife as well as brushes to apply thick strokes of paint in the final stages of a painting, creating highlights that glitter with a physical texture impossible to achieve by any other means. His late works, particularly in the areas of drapery and flesh, show an increasingly free and gestural application of thick paint that anticipates the expressionistic handling of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Rembrandt van Rijn brought impasto to its fullest expression in oil painting, using extremely thick accumulations of paint for his most luminous highlights — the gold thread on a collar, the glitter of a jewel, the highlight on a nose — while leaving the shadows thin and transparent. The contrast between thick light and thin shadow creates an optical effect in which the highlights advance toward the viewer and the shadows recede, reinforcing the three-dimensional illusion. This technique was so distinctive that Rembrandt's palette knife marks can still be read in the surface of his canvases with the naked eye, and under raking light they produce a topography as varied as a landscape. The impasto is not just a means to an end; it is part of the visual experience of the work.

The twentieth century liberated impasto from its representational function and made texture itself the subject. Van Gogh's swirling, heavily loaded brushstrokes — applied in the intense last years of his life at Arles and Saint-Rémy — made the impasto of paint so visually dominant that the question of what was represented became secondary to the question of how the paint moved. The Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s and 1950s — de Kooning, Kline, Mitchell — extended this until impasto became the entire language of the canvas: thick, gestural, physically present in a way that made the painted surface an event rather than a window. Joan Mitchell's late canvases apply paint in such dense layers that they weigh hundreds of pounds and require structural reinforcement.