The secret to it is to use a very watery paint and a dry brush. The sfumato (‘toning down’) method that he himself devised enabled him to do this with ease. The final layer of paint that he applied was so thin that it was impossible to see with the naked eye. In the main layer he often used burnt umber, yellow ochre, Prussian blue, cadmium yellow and burnt sienna. Over time, however, Leonardo’s dark-brown outline began, in spite of the thin layer, to show through beneath the painted image, making the painting turn darker in the shaded areas. – The final stage was the application of several glazed layers of overtones and the detail. – A thin underpainting was then painted, with the contours of volume – On a light ground, a sketch was drawn using one colour, with the outlines in sepia and the main shades The Flemish painting technique, so beloved by Leonardo da Vinci, involved the following stages: Deliberately applying the paint in layers makes it possible to achieve remarkable hues and effects, since, during glazing, each previous layer is visible underneath the next one. Corpus-based painting, whereby artists try to give their painting an air of completion straight away, is not, therefore, typical of the classic oil painting style. Oil painting is a technique that comes with a huge advantage: the artist can spend years painting the picture, gradually shaping the outline and painting in the details with thin layers of paint (a glaze).

The secrets of great art