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[[File:Van_Eyck_-_Arnolfini_Portrait.jpg|thumbnail|left|200px|Jan van Eyck, <i>Arnolfini Double Portrait</i>, 1434]]

Though tempera paints enjoyed a remarkable longevity, artists outside of the Italian peninsula were, by the early fifteenth century, had grown tired of the medium's chief limitation of these coloristic effects. While tempera paint allowed rich color, it did not permit deeply saturated colors nor subtle tonal gradations. This limitation is what contributed to the solidity of forms seen in earlier paintings, but it did not afford artists the opportunity to convey subdued washes of color. So, even before Botticelli began works like <i>Primavera</i> and <i>The Birth of Venus</i>, Northern European artists started to experiment with oil paints. Earning their name as they are composed of pigment and drying oil, such as the most common linseed oil, oil paints afforded artists a new-found flexibility in coloring effects.

One of the key pioneers of this new method was Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck. Fascinated by the potential of oil paintgs, van Eyck worked with a relatively unprecedented meticulousness in the soft glazes of colors he built up upon the surface of his paintings. The result, as seen in masterworks such as The Arnolfini Double Portrait from 1434, is an almost luminous effect to his compositions' surfaces. <ref> Raffaelli, J.F., "Solid Oil-Colors: An Innovation in Paints" <i> Brush and Pencil</i> Vol. 10, No. 5 (August 1902), pp. 297-298.</ref> Indeed, so "lustrous" were van Eyck's paintings that famed Italian biographer and early art historian Giorgio Vasari credited even Eyck with having created the medium. <ref> Vasari, Giorgio, "Capitolo XXI:Del dipingere a olio in tavola e su tele."<i>Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori.</i> 1568 edition.</ref> Predating works like Botticelli's by nearly half a century, van Eyck's use of oil paints reveals that the medium took hold in parts of Europe much earlier than in others; by the end of the fifteenth century, however, oils had become the main medium across the European continent.