fresco

 

  • In most early examples this work has now entirely vanished, but a whole painting done a secco on a surface roughened to give a key for the paint may survive very well, although
    damp is more threatening to it than to buon fresco.

  • This site-specific work was Novros’s first true fresco, which was restored by the artist in 2013.

  • Michelangelo used this technique as part of his trademark ‘outlining’ of his central figures within his frescoes.

  • At that time Hyde was using true fresco technique on small panels made of cast concrete arranged on the wall.

  • It is important to distinguish between a secco work done on top of buon fresco, which according to most authorities was in fact standard from the Middle Ages onwards, and
    work done entirely a secco on a blank wall.

  • After five centuries, the giornate, which were originally nearly invisible, have sometimes become visible, and in many large-scale frescoes, these divisions may be seen from
    the ground.

  • Many artists sketched their compositions on this underlayer, which would never be seen, in a red pigment called sinopia, a name also used to refer to these under-paintings.

  • In painting buon fresco, a rough underlayer called the arriccio is added to the whole area to be painted and allowed to dry for some days.

  • This area is called the giornata (“day’s work”), and the different day stages can usually be seen in a large fresco, by a faint seam that separates one from the next.

  • The most common form of fresco was Egyptian wall paintings in tombs, usually using the a secco technique.

  • [5] A technique used in the popular frescoes of Michelangelo and Raphael was to scrape indentations into certain areas of the plaster while still wet to increase the illusion
    of depth and to accent certain areas over others.

  • On the day of painting, the intonaco, a thinner, smooth layer of fine plaster was added to the amount of wall that was expected to be completed that day, sometimes matching
    the contours of the figures or the landscape, but more often just starting from the top of the composition.

  • Pantocrator from Sant Climent de Taüll, in MNAC Barcelona Myrrhbearers on Christ’s Grave, c 1235 AD, Mileševa monastery in Serbian The late Medieval period and the Renaissance
    saw the most prominent use of fresco, particularly in Italy, where most churches and many government buildings still feature fresco decoration.

  • Holland Cotter of the New York Times described the work as “objectifying some of the individual elements that have made modern paintings paintings”.

  • Some art historians believe that fresco artists from Crete may have been sent to various locations as part of a trade exchange, a possibility which raises to the fore the
    importance of this art form within the society of the times.

  • A third type called a mezzo-fresco is painted on nearly dry intonaco—firm enough not to take a thumb-print, says the sixteenth-century author Ignazio Pozzo—so that the pigment
    only penetrates slightly into the plaster.

  • The tradition of painted churches continued into the 19th century in other parts of Romania, although never to the same extent.

  • [32][33] The following is the process that was used when rescuing frescoes in La Fenice, a Venetian opera house, but the same process can be used for similarly damaged frescoes.

  • One of the first painters in the post-classical period to use this technique was the Isaac Master (or Master of the Isaac fresco, and thus a name used to refer to the unknown
    master of a particular painting) in the Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi.

  • [6] It has also become increasingly clear, thanks to modern analytical techniques, that even in the early Italian Renaissance painters quite frequently employed a secco techniques
    so as to allow the use of a broader range of pigments.

  • India[edit] Fresco from the Ajanta Caves built and painted during the Gupta Empire in the 6th century AD Thanks to large number of ancient rock-cut cave temples, valuable
    ancient and early medieval frescoes have been preserved in more than 20 locations of India.

  • [1][2] The word fresco is commonly and inaccurately used in English to refer to any wall painting regardless of the plaster technology or binding medium.

  • Roman frescoes were done by the artist painting the artwork on the still damp plaster of the wall, so that the painting is part of the wall, actually colored plaster.

  • [26] While Hyde’s work “ranges from paintings on photographic prints to large-scale installations, photography, and abstract furniture design” his frescoes on Styrofoam have
    been a significant form of his work since the 80’s.

  • Throughout the next decade Hyde experimented with multiple rigid supports for the fresco plaster including composite board and plate glass.

  • Painted in 1930 by José Clemente Orozco, it is the first example of a fresco mural in the U.S.[31] Conservation of frescoes The climate and environment of Venice has proved
    to be a problem for frescoes and other works of art in the city for centuries.

  • The additional a secco work would be done to make changes, and sometimes to add small details, but also because not all colours can be achieved in true fresco, because only
    some pigments work chemically in the very alkaline environment of fresh lime-based plaster.

  • In a wall-sized fresco, there may be ten to twenty or even more giornate, or separate areas of plaster.

  • [24] Novros used medieval techniques to create the mural by “first preparing a full-scale cartoon, which he transferred to the wet plaster using the traditional pouncing technique,”
    the act of passing powdered pigment onto the plaster through tiny perforations in a cartoon.

  • Early modern Europe[edit] Northern Romania (historical region of Moldavia) boasts about a dozen painted monasteries, completely covered with frescos inside and out, that date
    from the last quarter of the 15th century to the second quarter of the 16th century.

  • Ancient references, however, refer to the existence of as many as five hundred of these frescoes.

  • [16] In Denmark too, church wall paintings or kalkmalerier were widely used in the Middle Ages (first Romanesque, then Gothic) and can be seen in some 600 Danish churches
    as well as in churches in the south of Sweden, which was Danish at the time.

  • This gives the painting added durability, as clearly demonstrated by the fact that they have survived, exposed to the elements, for over 1,500 years.

  • In ArtForum David Pagel wrote, “like ruins from some future archaeological dig, Hyde’s nonrepresentational frescoes on large chunks of Styrofoam give suggestive shape to the
    fleeting landscape of the present”.

  • Several of the themes and designs visible in the fresco are otherwise known from other Naqada II objects, such as the Gebel el-Arak Knife.

  • The fresco technique has been employed since antiquity and is closely associated with Italian Renaissance painting.

  • Within that short span, such large paintings were painted with natural organic pigments.

  • [17] One of the rare examples of Islamic fresco painting can be seen in Qasr Amra, the desert palace of the Umayyads in the 8th century Magotez.

  • Suceviţa, dating from 1600, represents a late return to the style developed some 70 years earlier.

  • Scenes from epics of Mahabharat and Ramayan along with portraits of local lords form the subject matter of these wall paintings.

  • [23] While Marden employed the imagistic effects of fresco, David Novros was developing a 50-year practice around the technique.

  • Generally, buon fresco works are more durable than any a secco work added on top of them, because a secco work lasts better with a roughened plaster surface, whilst true fresco
    should have a smooth one.

  • This, in part, contributes to a misconception that the most geographically and temporally common wall painting technology was the painting into wet lime plaster.

  • Water is used as the vehicle for the dry-powder pigment to merge with the plaster, and with the setting of the plaster, the painting becomes an integral part of the wall.

  • The painter then proceeds much as he or she would on a canvas or wood panel.

  • While some similar frescoes have been found in other locations around the Mediterranean basin, particularly in Egypt and Morocco, their origins are subject to speculation.

  • [22] Contemporary[edit] There have been comparatively few frescoes created since the 1960s but there are some significant exceptions.

  • ]new techniques for transferring paper drawings to the wall were developed.

  • View of a woman’s face in the central chamber of the Ostrusha mound built in the 4th century BC in Bulgaria Roman wall paintings, such as those at the magnificent Villa dei
    Misteri (1st century BC) in the ruins of Pompeii, and others at Herculaneum, were completed in buon fresco.

  • History Egypt and Ancient Near East[edit] The first known Egyptian fresco was found in Tomb 100 at Hierakonpolis, and dated to c. 3500–3200 BC.

  • In 1991 at John Good Gallery in New York City, Hyde debuted true fresco applied on an enormous block of Styrofoam.

  • If mistakes have been made, it may also be necessary to remove the whole intonaco for that area—or to change them later, a secco.

  • [25] The surface unity of the fresco was important to Novros in that the pigment he used bonded with the drying plaster, becoming part of the wall rather than a surface coating.

 

Works Cited

[‘1. Mora, Paolo; Mora, Laura; Philippot, Paul (1984). Conservation of Wall Paintings. Butterworths. pp. 34–54. ISBN 0-408-10812-6.
2. ^ Ward, Gerald W. R., ed. (2008). The GroveEncyclopedia of Materials and Techniques in Art. Oxford University Press.
pp. 223–5. ISBN 978-0-19-531391-8.
3. ^ Piqué, Francesca (2015). Organic materials in wall paintings : project report. Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute. ISBN 978-1-937433-29-1. OCLC 944038739.
4. ^ Mora, Paolo; Mora, Laura; Philippot,
Paul (1984). Conservation of Wall Paintings. Butterworths. pp. 47–54. ISBN 0-408-10812-6.
5. ^ How is a fresco made? – Fresco Blog by Italian Fresco Blog.
6. ^ All this section – Ugo Procacci, in Frescoes from Florence, pp. 15–25 1969, Arts Council,
London.
7. ^ Case, Humphrey; Payne, Joan Crowfoot (1962). “Tomb 100: The Decorated Tomb at Hierakonpolis”. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. 48: 17. doi:10.2307/3855778. ISSN 0307-5133. JSTOR 3855778.
8. ^ Shaw, Ian (2019). Ancient Egyptian
Warfare: Tactics, Weaponry and Ideology of the Pharaohs. Open Road Media. p. 22. ISBN 978-1-5040-6059-2.
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Violence and Power in Ancient Egypt: Image and Ideology before the New Kingdom. Routledge. p. 94. ISBN 978-1-134-85626-8.
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Nina M. Davies: Ancient Egyptian paintings, Vol. III, Chicago, 1963, p. xxxi online
13. ^ Ancient and medieval Indian cave paintings – Internet encyclopedia by Wondermondo. Retrieved 4 June 2010.
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Melbourne: Panique Pty Ltd. ISBN 9780987345110.
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Francesca; Yarza, Joaquín; fotografies de Ramon Manent, Pere Pascual i Rosina Ramírez (2007). El romànic català (in Catalan) (1. ed.). Barcelona: Angle Editorial. ISBN 9788496970090.
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– Conservation ethics and methods of treatment from the National Museum of Denmark” Archived 24 November 2009 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2 March 2010.
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W. (1957). “Orozco’s Prometheus: Summation, Transition, Innovation”. College Art Journal. 17 (1): 2–18. doi:10.2307/773653. ISSN 1543-6322. JSTOR 773653.
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Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/joceykinghorn/10164073235/’]