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A Fresh Look at Frescoes
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10262 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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12 / 1993 |
1,814 Words |
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Christopher Andreae
Christopher Andreae, a resident of Glasgow, Scotland, is an arts writer who contributes regularly to the Christian Science Monitor and is a correspondent for ARTnews. |
Through the centuries--from the Stone Age images in the caves of Altamira and Lascaux, and the hieroglyphs in the Egyptian pyramids, to the graffiti of today's slumscapes--artists have found walls an irresistible surface on which to paint. True, they are not portable (which is one reason why painting on wooden boards, canvas, silk, and paper became popular), but walls do have a certain appeal.
For starters, they are--like Everest--there. They ask to be conquered.
Then too, they can offer space of grand architectural proportions, allowing the realization of highly ambitious projects that attract artists (such as Michelangelo) smitten with grandiose, heroic ideas.
Also, for the very reason that wall paintings cannot easily be moved--being frequently attached to buildings--they seem to offer permanence to the painter's work. (This can be deceptive, though, particularly when an artist is commissioned to update an earlier one's work. Then little mercy is shown: The old paintings are generally destroyed and replaced.)
Finally, mural paintings are public and important, performing a variety of social functions, and can therefore bring the artist considerable recognition.
In the first years of the fourteenth century, not long after Giotto finished the paintings that cover the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy, his frescoes there were already attracting sightseers--and have continued to do so to our own day. (Certainly they are one of the musts of art touring in Italy.) Acutely dramatic in the way they tell the Christian story of the redemption of mankind, and at the same time decorative, they are one of the earliest, but still most accomplished, examples of the specific kind of painting-on-walls that was a chief glory of the Italian Renaissance: fresco.
The word fresco is often used for any kind of wall painting. But the appearance of a real fresco is quite different from that of other kinds of mural paintings (its colors have a dry, powdery look and seem to glow with an inner light), and it involves a unique--and demanding--technique. Fresco is a way of painting on a wall that makes the colors actually sink into the plaster surface and become integral to it. Water-based paint is brushed onto patches of freshly applied lime plaster--a final thin coat called intonaco, fine and smooth, troweled over a rougher underplaster. A chemical
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