Painterly

Painterly is a term denoting the application of paint in a «free», less controlled manner, as a result of which visible brushstrokes remain in the finished painting. This approach is contrasted with the linear, or graphic, mode, in which forms are outlined by clear contours and the brushstrokes are smoothed away and imperceptible. The concept of the «painterly» (German malerisch) was developed and given theoretical grounding by the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin in his «Principles of Art History» (1915) as one of five pairs of opposites by which he distinguished the styles of the Renaissance and the Baroque. In the painterly style, forms merge, and emphasis falls on masses of light and shadow, on colour and movement, rather than on a closed contour. Classic examples of painterly handling are the works of Titian, Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Frans Hals, and later the Impressionists. The painterly approach stresses the very process of painting and the materiality of the paint, and so remains one of the key concepts for the analysis of style in European painting.