Beginning at the top left-hand corner and working down, the artist traced lines and painted in earth colors. This allowed only spreading enough intonaco for a day’s work-about 1m 2 (10ft 2). This was fresco secco. The result was beautiful, but somewhat opaque.īuon fresco was possible because the Renaissance artist could hire an entire team to help. Painting with binder-enriched colors and egg or glue sealants began after the wall hardened. After that, he spread the intonaco onto the drawings in large sections and let it dry.

He began with the arriccio (rough plaster) on the wall, then drew onto the arriccio with charcoal, ochre, and red sinopia. Pre-Renaissance, the fresco artist usually applied all layers himself. Detail of Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (via Wikimedia Commons) They developed a new standard called buon fresco (genuine fresco) that was much more rigorous. But Renaissance purists found this fresco secco (dry fresco) unforgivably lazy. Before and after the Renaissance, wall rewetting, adding binding agents to colors and various finishing touches were permitted, as this 1861 article explains. In reality, fresco painters painted in sections and interpreted “wet plaster” loosely.įresco painting splits loosely into Pre-Renaissance, Renaissance, and Post-Renaissance. Pausing to consider the size of most frescoes-Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel murals (1425-1427), Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508 – 1512) and the thirteenth-century walls of The Church of Saint Eutrope in Les Salles Lavauguyon-the process seems impossible. Ideally, the entire painting is applied to the top coat of wet plaster called intonaco and they dry together-meaning during one day.

The wall must be wet, hence the name fresco, which means wet, fresh, and cool in one Italian word. Frescoes, perhaps the best-known wall paintings, are the result of a chemical reaction turning paint and wet plaster into a single, solid surface of calcium carbonate.

Fresco drawing