Ars Pictoria Project

Ars Pictoria is a practice-based technical art history project dedicated to the research, reconstruction, and transmission of Renaissance drawing and painting techniques. Its work is grounded in primary period sources, material examination, and experimental studio practice.

It was founded by Gleb Shtyrmer, who began the work as personal artistic research more than a decade ago; it has since grown into a series of rigorously developed academic courses, museum projects and collaborations with leading art history institutes.

In this talk at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, Gleb Shtyrmer introduces the research behind Ars Pictoria and its applications today:

Mission

Ars Pictoria exists to recover lost or disappearing material culture: the specific knowledge, sensibility, and manual skill behind historical painting and its allied crafts. Rather than reenactment or an attempt to recreate the look of the past, the goal is to recover a lost culture, the ways of thinking, artistry, judgement, and methodology of the great masters, only partially captured in written treatises, and to pass it on the way this kind of knowledge has always been transmitted: through living practice.

With this objective in mind, Gleb combines his own research and studio practice with regular collaborations with some of Italy’s most accomplished local artisans who join as guest instructors in his courses or collaborators on Ars Pictoria projects, aiming to recover rare and disappearing knowledge that was never written into any treatise, but still survives in Italian botteghe, passed from master to apprentice, hand to hand, outside the historical record.

Research Methodology

Ars Pictoria’s research begins with the period’s own written sources: treatises, manuals and recipe books. These are read philologically, then tested through direct reconstruction of period materials and techniques, aiming not just to understand the mechanics of a process, but to reproduce it at a comparable level of artistic quality. It is through this attempt, and its difficulty, that much can be learned about the creative strategies and workshop practices of the period’s artists.

Treatises are necessarily incomplete: they leave out what would have been self-evident at the time, and much of the rest, the feel of a material, the timing of a process. This is what reconstruction through practice recovers.

Ars Pictoria also draws on present-day technical examination of paintings, particularly valuable source, since every artist worked differently and few ever documented their own process, where treatises describe general practice, technical examination reveals the choices of a specific hand.

Gleb Shtyrmer
Artist and Educator, Founder of Ars Pictoria

Gleb Shtyrmer is an artist and researcher based in Florence, specializing in the reconstruction of Renaissance drawing and painting techniques and materials. He is a professor at Syracuse University and at Santa Reparata International School of Art (SRISA). His work spans museum collaborations, documentary consultancy, and hands-on workshops for art historians, conservators, and practicing artists, bringing period sources and methods back into living practice.

Projects & Collaborations

• San Marco Museum, Florence: Two permanent displays on the materials and tools of illuminated manuscript production
• Leonardo3 Museum, Milan: Permanent display on Leonardo’s circle Renaissance drawing materials
• Ken Burns’ Leonardo da Vinci documentary: Technical consultant; reconstructed historical materials and demonstrated period techniques on screen
• NIKI Florence, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, University of Amsterdam (Dept. of Technical Art History): Hands-on workshops for art historians and faculty
• Syracuse University, Renaissance Art History graduate program: Technical art history course
• Santa Reparata International School of Art (SRISA): Undergraduate studio courses in Renaissance painting and drawing techniques
• Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli, Sansone Restauro, and other public and private institutions: art and design workshops and courses

Ars Pictoria excels at making a complex material culture understandable and tangible for audiences who rarely share a common vocabulary: studio artists, art historians, conservators, museum visitors, and students encountering these techniques for the first time.

This means translating specialist knowledge into a form that is accurate enough for a scholar and clear enough for a general audience, without flattening it into jargon or spectacle. The museum displays, the documentary work, and the courses all serve this same function: helping people understand and appreciate Renaissance art, and, through practice, make this culture their own.

Ars Pictoria is a technical art history project, but its focus is the hands-on practice, materials, research, and transmission of historical techniques, rather than academic publications. The content on this site functions primarily as a knowledge base supporting the workshops and courses, giving historical context for the techniques covered in the studio.

There is substantial research behind every article and every technique, but nothing here claims to be absolute truth. The history of painting spans thousands of years, with infinite variation specific to a period, a region, or even a single artist; there is rarely one universal recipe or process. What Ars Pictoria does instead is compare sources, weigh them against material evidence, and try to understand the underlying logic that drove a technique.

In the spirit of Vasari, Ars Pictoria hopes to contribute, in its own humble way, to the art itself, and to the understanding and skill of the future artists and art historians.

• Drawing tools and materials: making of a quill and reed pen, crafting inks, preparation of toned paper, silverpoint ground, natural and fabricated chalks
• Renaissance drawing techniques: silverpoint, ink and pen, chalks and chiaro-scuro drawing on toned paper
• Panel preparation: choosing supports, sizing, priming and smoothing the ground
• Underdrawing: transferring the preparatory design, making the underdrawing
• Gilding: process of applying golden-leaf grounds, an overview of gilding techniques and an introduction to water gilding
• Painting materials: pigments and binding mediums, their properties and uses, preparation of the binders and grinding pigments
• Egg tempera painting: making egg tempera paint, the methodology of egg tempera painting, ways of applying paint layers, modelling volumes, mixing colours, preparation of tempera grassa and egg emulsions
• Fresco painting and its materials
• Bibliography — primary and secondary sources behind the research on this site
• Student Works — results from courses and workshops, showing these techniques in practice

How to Cite This Page

Shtyrmer, Gleb. “Ars Pictoria Project.” Ars Pictoria. Accessed [date]. https://arspictoria.com/about/

Revision and Review Record

Ars Pictoria is a living project, and its content is revised as new sources, material evidence, or scholarship come to light. When new evidence contradicts something previously published here, the page is corrected rather than left as is. This page was last reviewed on August 5th 2026.