2This book on the Golden Age of Art explores the methods and materials used by the great masters from both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It focuses on the most difficult subject on earth to paint, the human face. These pages are the accumulation of knowledge gained through observation and countless visits to art museums and hundreds of books on the subject in a quest to find the secrets of successfully painting the human face in the style of the great masters. Without the benefit of any formal education in art, I have spent my last forty years on a mission to answer the question "How did they do that?" What is represented here is what I wish I could have read before I picked up my first brush.