His best works display great technical skill, particularly in the handling of colour.
The simple, abstract handling of colour and design represented a totally new visual experience.
A succession of brilliant painters Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese developed the lyrical Venetian painting style that combined pagan subject matter, sensuous handling of colour and paint surface, and a love of extravagant settings.
There are Renaissance elements, such as a sculptural treatment of forms and fragments of a broken perspective scheme in this work, but the bright handling of colour and the elaborate decorative patterns of the figures and landscape are indebted to the Gothic style.
Mannerism had given way to harmonious rhythms and a superb handling of colour that imbued his frescoes with glowing vitality: the mythological scenes exalting human pleasures, the depiction of Barbaro's wife with the children and the wet nurse, and the landscapes, rendered in illusionistic perspective and detailed with classic ruins.
His approach to composition and his rendering of space and light like his handling of contour, form, and colour, his brushwork, and (in his drawings and etchings) his treatment of line and tone are subject to gradual (or sometimes abrupt) transformation, even within a single work.
After the death of Cosmas Damian Asam in 1739, Johann Baptist Zimmermann became the most important fresco painter in the Munich area; his lyrical handling of pale colours is typical of the Rococo period.
"Yes, of course, Turner's late style is characterised by freedom of handling, vivid colour, a breaking down of solid form in light and atmosphere," he says, "so that it's almost as if the operation of light or atmosphere on something like a mountain or a building becomes the subject rather than the mountain or the building itself".
This experience did not, however, dampen Arikha's ardour for the avant garde, and he eventually took up the still-fashionable cause of abstract art, although with a distinctive sense of colour and handling of paint.
It was in this respect and in the all-embracing unity of colour and handling that resulted, rather than in its realism, that Impressionism founded modern painting.
Wagner paid tribute to his handling of paint and use of colour: in his picture Excavations in Manchester (1932), which shows workmen digging out the foundations of a new building, she said "he looked into the belly of modern life... building up his painting in a way analogous to the building going on apace in the scene he was depicting".
