Verdaccio — Green Earth Underpainting

The most striking thing Jan Dickey showed us at the workshop wasn't a recipe at all — it was a way of seeing: verdaccio, the green earth underpainting that gives early Renaissance skin its uncanny inner life. And it only works because of everything egg tempera is.

The technique

The method is counterintuitive. To paint warm flesh, you start with cool green. The whole figure — or the whole passage of skin — is first painted in green earth (terre verte). Only then do you layer the reds and yellows of flesh on top.

Because egg tempera is always semi-transparent, the green doesn't get buried — it shows through the warm glazes. Optically, the cool green beneath and the warm red/yellow above mix in the eye rather than on the panel, and the green reads as the bluish cast of veins under skin. That tension between cool depth and warm surface is exactly what makes painted flesh look alive rather than flat and pink.

Why only egg tempera

This is the crucial point: verdaccio depends entirely on the semi-transparency of egg tempera. An opaque medium — casein, distemper, opaque acrylic — would simply cover the green and the effect would vanish. The technique is not decorative; it is a direct exploitation of the binder's inherent translucence. Master the medium's transparency and verdaccio becomes available; lose it and the whole optical strategy collapses.

The zombie problem

Jan made a vivid aside: many old paintings now "look almost zombie-like." The reason is pigment fading. The warm flesh layers relied on organic pigments — madder, saffron — which are UV-sensitive and fade over centuries. The green earth, a stable mineral pigment, does not. So the cool underpaint that was meant to whisper beneath the skin now shouts, far more visible than the painter ever intended. Those greenish, hollow faces are not how the works looked when fresh — they are a record of which pigments survived.

Variations and relatives

• French academic shift: later painters moved toward a redder earth (burnt sienna or umber) for the underpaint, producing a warmer final result with a different optical logic.
• Reverse painting: a participant noted the East Asian tradition of painting on the back of paper or silk; Jan confirmed both verdaccio and reverse painting are ways to build layered color depth through the support rather than only on its face.

Jan uses green earth underpainting with egg tempera in his own work — not as historical reenactment but because the physics still holds: cool below, warm above, transparency between.

Jay's Studio Note

Verdaccio undid an assumption I didn't know I had — that you build skin by mixing the right pink. You don't. You build it in layers of opposite temperature, and you let the eye do the mixing. Starting flesh with green felt almost transgressive, and then watching it come alive under the warm glaze was the moment the whole day clicked. The zombie story has stayed with me most, though. Those faces aren't a style — they're time made visible, a slow unequal fading of organic versus mineral pigment. It reframed permanence as something you can paint with: choose where you want the work to change and where you want it to hold. That's a studio question, not just an art-history one, and we've been thinking about it on everything we make since.

References

• Jan Dickey, Tempera & Distemper Workshop, Material Memory Studio, Seoul, 7 June 2026. Jan Dickey is a New York-based painter, curator, and art writer. Jan Dickey at Material Memory Studio
• Cennino Cennini, Il Libro dell'Arte, c. 1400 — Chapter on painting flesh in egg tempera using green earth underpainting
• For the fading of organic red and yellow pigments: see Thompson, Daniel V., The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting, 1956