TEXT C Watercolor is the oldest
painting medium known. It dates back to the early cave dwellers ’who discovered
they could add lifelike qualities to drawings of animals and other figures on
the walls of caves by mixing the natural colors found in the earth with
water. Fresco, one of the greatest of all art forms, is done
with watercolor. It is created by mixing pigments and water and applying these
to wet plaster. Of the thousands of people who stand under Michelangelo’s heroic
ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, very few are aware that they are looking at
perhaps the greatest watercolor painting in the world. The
invention of oil painting by the Flemish masters in the fifteenth century led to
a decline in fresco painting, and for the next several centuries watercolor was
used mainly as a medium for doing preliminary sketches or as a tool for study.
It was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that English painters
reinstated watercolor as a serious art form. The English have a notorious love
for the outdoors and also great fondness for small, intimate pictures. The
subdued tones of watercolor had a remarkably strong appeal for them.
The popularity of watercolor continued to grow until in the twentieth
century the United States passed England as the center for watercolor, producing
such well - known watercolor artists as Thomas Eakins and Andrew Wyeth. Which of the following can be inferred about what 16th and 17th century artists thought of watercolor painting in comparison to oil painting
A．Watercolor waft more costly, but was better. B．Oil painting was less permanent, but more vivid. C．Watercolor was not appropriate for finished works. D．Oil painting tended to be difficult to use.