wife got me a study bible and asked if she can read it with me 
been posting a lot of wholesome vibes since i have this medical thing and a family member is dying (not really looking for sympathy there, hes like 90 and has hardcore dementia). im sure once things stabilize over here i will return to my regular punchy and comedic self. probably
maybe
if you wanted to notice something cool in the image, the artist has put these cracked egg shells on the ground to imply the painter we’re observing is using egg tempera, a type of paint where egg is the glue holding it together. you can see a pile of raw ground pigment as well
egg tempera dries really fast. this affects the shading the artist can use as he has to work within the limitations of fast drying layers of paint. when oil paint was invented, that stays wet forever, so you can blend it, and basically thats partially why the renaissance happened
its not a coincidence that right after oil paint was invented you get da vinci with smoky blurry backgrounds and more realistic shading + things like that. most “art scholars” attribute this shift purely to ideological development, ignoring the development of materials entirely
today a relatively unknown (outside artist circles) type of paint called gouache is the most similar to egg tempera. goes on opaque, dries very fast, chalk finish, etc. ive also used mineral pigments bound in animal glue (common in central asia) and it handles almost the same way
this material connection is one reason for certain similarities between medieval european and “medieval” buddhist and hindu art (nepal, northern india, tibet) which breaks entierly when the west adopts oil paint which never caught on in the east for a variety of reasons.
