Fresco

About

True fresco, buon fresco in Italian, is painted into wet lime plaster. Pigments ground in water sink into the surface, and as the lime reacts with air they are locked into a thin crystalline skin, so the colour becomes part of the wall. Painters lay only as much plaster as they can cover before it sets, leaving faint seams between patches. Touches added after drying, a secco, often flake away, which is why some blues have vanished.

Italy perfected the method. Giotto covered the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua around 1305, Masaccio gave figures new weight in the Brancacci Chapel in the 1420s, and Francesco del Cossa painted months of the year at Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara around 1470. Giambattista Tiepolo's ceiling at Würzburg (1752–53) carried fresco into Rococo space. José Clemente Orozco and his fellow Mexican muralists revived it in the 1920s and 1930s for public, political walls.