Fresco
Fresco (Italian: “fresh”) is the traditional medium for painting directly onto a wall or ceiling. It is the oldest known painting medium, surviving in the prehistoric cave mural decorations and perfected in 16th-century Italy in the buon fresco method.
The cave paintings are thought to date from about 20,000–15,000 bce. Their pigments probably have been preserved by a natural sinter process of rainwater seeping through the limestone rocks to produce saturated bicarbonate. The colours were rubbed across rock walls and ceilings with sharpened solid lumps of the natural earths (yellow, red, and brown ochre). Outlines were drawn with black sticks of wood charcoal. The discovery of mixing dishes suggests that liquid pigment mixed with fat was also used and smeared with the hand. The subtle tonal gradations of colour on animals painted in the Altamira and Lascaux caves appear to have been dabbed in two stages with fur pads, natural variations on the rock surface being exploited to assist in creating effects of volume. Feathers and frayed twigs may have been used in painting manes and tails.
These were not composite designs but separate scenes and individual studies that, like graffiti drawings, were added at different times, often one on top of another, by various artists. Paintings from approximately 18,000 to 11,000 years ago, during the Magdalenian period, exhibit astonishing powers of accurate observation and ability to represent movement. Women, warriors, horses, bison, bulls, boars, and ibex are depicted in scenes of ritual ceremony, battle, and hunting. Among the earliest images are imprinted and stencilled hands. Vigorous meanders, or “macaroni” linear designs, were traced with fingers dipped in liquid pigment.
Fresco secco
In the fresco secco, or lime-painting, method, the plastered surface of a wall is soaked with slaked lime. Lime-resistant pigments are applied swiftly before the plaster sets. Secco colours dry lighter than their tone at the time of application, producing the pale, matte, chalky quality of a distempered wall. Although the pigments are fused with the surface, they are not completely absorbed and may flake in time, as in sections of Giotto’s 14th-century San Francesco murals at Assisi. Secco painting was the prevailing medieval and early Renaissance medium and was revived in 18th-century Europe by artists such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, François Boucher, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
Buon fresco
Buon’, or “true,” fresco is the most-durable method of painting murals, since the pigments are completely fused with a damp plaster ground to become an integral part of the wall surface. The stone or brick wall is first prepared with a brown trullisatio scratch coat, or rough-cast plaster layer. This is then covered by the arricciato coat, on which the linear design of the preparatory cartoon is pounced or engraved by impressing the outlines into the moist, soft plaster with a bone or metal stylus. These lines were usually overworked in reddish sinopia pigment. A thin layer of fine plaster is then evenly spread, allowing the linear design to show through. Before this final intonaco ground sets, pigments thinned with water or slaked lime are applied rapidly with calf-hair and hog-bristle brushes; depth of colour is achieved by a succession of quick-drying glazes. Being prepared with slaked lime, the plaster becomes saturated with an aqueous solution of hydrate of lime, which takes up carbonic acid from the air as it soaks into the paint. Carbonate of lime is produced and acts as a permanent pigment binder. Pigment particles crystallize in the plaster, fusing it with the surface to produce the characteristic lustre of buonfresco colours. When dry, these are matte and lighter in tone. Colours are restricted to the range of lime-resistant earth pigments. Mineral colours such as blue, affected by lime, are applied over earth pigment when the plaster is dry.
The intonaco coat is laid only across an area sufficient for painting before the plaster sets. The joins between each successive giornate (“day’s work”) are sometimes visible. Alterations must be made by immediate washing or scraping; minor retouching to set plaster is possible with casein or egg tempera, but major corrections necessitate breaking away the intonaco and replastering. The swift execution demanded stimulates bold designs in broad masses of colour with a calligraphic vitality of brush marks.
No ancient Greek buon frescoes now exist, but forms of the technique survive in the Pompeian villas of the 1st century ce and earlier, in Chinese tombs at Liaoyang, Manchuria, and in the 6th-century Indian caves at Ajanta. Among the finest buon fresco murals are those by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel and by Raphael in the Stanze of the Vatican. Other notable examples from the Italian Renaissance can be seen in Florence: painted by Andrea Orcagna in the Museo dell’Opera di Santa Croce, by Gozzoli in the chapel of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, and by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the church of Santa Maria Novella. Buon fresco painting is unsuited to the damp, cold climate of northern countries, and there is now some concern for the preservation of frescoes in the sulfurous atmosphere of even many southern cities. Buon fresco was successfully revived by the Mexican mural painters Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and Rufino Tamayo.
Sgraffito
Sgraffito (Italian graffiare, “to scratch”) is a form of fresco painting for exterior walls. A rough plaster undercoat is followed by thin plaster layers, each stained with a different lime-fast colour. These coats are covered by a fine-grain mortar finishing surface. The plaster is then engraved with knives and gouges at different levels to reveal the various coloured layers beneath. The sintered-lime process binds the colours. The surface of modern sgraffito frescoes is often enriched with textures made by impressing nails and machine parts, combined with mosaics of stone, glass, plastic, and metal tesserae.
Sgraffito has been a traditional folk art in Europe since the Middle Ages and was practiced as a fine art in 13th-century Germany. It was revived in updated and modified ways by 20th-century artists such as Max Ernst and Jean Dubuffet.
Oil
Oil paints are made by mixing dry pigment powder with refined linseed oil to a paste, which is then milled in order to disperse the pigment particles throughout the oil vehicle. According to the 1st-century Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, whose writings the Flemish painters Hubert and Jan van Eyck are thought to have studied, the Romans used oil colours for shield painting. The earliest use of oil as a fine-art medium is generally attributed to 15th-century European painters, such as Giovanni Bellini and the van Eycks, who glazed oil colour over a glue-tempera underpainting. It is also thought probable, however, that medieval manuscript illuminators had been using oil glazes in order to achieve greater depth of colour and more subtle tonal transitions than their tempera medium allowed.
Oils have been used on linen, burlap, cotton, wood, hide, rock, stone, concrete, paper, cardboard, aluminum, copper, plywood, and processed boards, such as masonite, pressed wood, and hardboard. The surface of rigid panels is traditionally prepared with gesso and that of canvas with one or more coats of white acrylic resin emulsion or with a coat of animal glue followed by thin layers of white-lead oil primer. Oil paints can be applied undiluted to these prepared surfaces or can be used thinned with pure gum turpentine or its substitute, white mineral spirit. The colours are slow drying; the safest dryer to speed the process is cobalt siccative.
An oil glaze is a transparent wash of pigment, traditionally thinned with an oleoresin or with stand oil (a concentrate of linseed oil). Glazes can be used to create deep, glowing shadows and to bring contrasted colours into closer harmony beneath a unifying tinted film. Scumbling is the technique of scrubbing an undiluted, opaque, and generally pale pigment across others for special textural effects or to raise the key of a dark-coloured area.
Hog-bristle brushes are used for much of the painting, with pointed, red sable-hair brushes generally preferred for outlines and fine details. Oils, however, are the most plastic and responsive of all painting mediums and can be handled with all manner of tools. The later works of Titian and Rembrandt, for example, appear to have been executed with thumbs, fingers, rags, spatulas, and brush handles. With these and other unconventional tools and techniques, oil painters create pigment textures ranging from delicate tonal modulations to unvarying, mechanical finishes and from clotted, impasto ridges of paint to barely perceptible stains.
The tempera-underpainting-oil-glaze technique was practiced into the 17th century. Artists such as Titian, El Greco, Rubens, and Diego Velázquez, however, used oil pigments alone and, employing a method similar to pastel painting, applied them directly to the brownish ground with which they had tinted the white priming. Contours and shadows were stained in streaks and washes of diluted paint, while lighter areas were created with dry, opaque scumbles, the tinted ground meanwhile providing the halftones and often remaining untouched for passages of local or reflected colour in the completed picture. This use of oil paint was particularly suited to expressing atmospheric effects and to creating chiaroscuro, or light and dark, patterns. It also encouraged a bravura handling of paint, where stabs, flourishes, lifts, and pressures of the brush economically described the most subtle changes of form, texture, and colour according to the influence exerted by the tinted ground through the varying thicknesses of overlaid pigment. This method was still practiced by the 19th-century painters, such as John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Eugène Delacroix, and Honoré Daumier. The Impressionists, however, found the luminosity of a brilliant white ground essential to the alla prima technique with which they represented the colour intensities and shifting lights of their plein air (open air) subjects. Most oil paintings since then have been executed on white surfaces.
The rapid deterioration of Leonardo’s 15th-century Last Supper (last restored 1978–99), which was painted in oils on plaster, may have deterred later artists from using the medium directly on a wall surface. The likelihood of eventual warping also prohibited using the large number of braced wood panels required to make an alternative support for an extensive mural painting in oils. Because canvas can be woven to any length and because an oil-painted surface is elastic, mural paintings could be executed in the studio and rolled and restretched on a wooden framework at the site or marouflaged (fastened with an adhesive) directly onto a wall surface. In addition to the immense studio canvases painted for particular sites by artists such as Jacopo Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, Delacroix, Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, and Claude Monet, the use of canvas has made it possible for mural-size, modern oil paintings to be transported for exhibition to all parts of the world.
The tractable nature of the oil medium has sometimes encouraged careless craftsmanship. Working over partly dry pigment or priming may produce a wrinkled surface. The excessive use of oil as a vehicle causes colours to yellow and darken, while cracking, blooming, powdering, and flaking can result from poor priming, overthinning with turpentine, or the use of varnish dryers and other spirits. Colour changes may also occur through the use of chemically incompatible pigment mixtures or from the fading of fugitive synthetic hues, such as crimson lakes, the brilliant red pigment favoured by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.