A Complete Guide to Fresco Painting

Fresco painting is a technique that dates back thousands of years. Although exact techniques varied from century to century, the popular understanding of it is the process of applying pigment to a freshly plastered wall that would absorb color. From ancient painters of Pompeii to Diego Rivera, artists of all eras valued frescoes for their brightness and durability. Read on to learn more about fresco painting and its history.

Fresco is an ancient technique of painting that is usually used to decorate the inner and outer walls of buildings by painting over wet plaster surfaces. The earliest found paintings that fell under the category of fresco were 4th-century BCE artworks found in Egypt. However, some art experts name 2000 BCE Bronze Age images as the first frescoes. They were painted on limestone with wet natural pigments. Fresco painting was popular in Ancient Greece and Rome and then adopted by Byzantine and Kyivan Rus painters. However, the most significant era in the history of fresco painting began in Renaissance Italy. Due to the development of the art industry and comfortable climate, many Italian frescoes from that era were remarkably preserved.

Despite the ancient origins of the technique, the term fresco occurred in writing for the first time in the 1437 treatise of painting written by Cennino Cennini, a prominent Florentine painter and a student of Giotto. Cennini’s account is one of the most detailed in the history of art, representing a detailed technical manual on late Medieval and early Renaissance art, including the proportions of pigments and preparation for creating paintings, textile designs, and frescoes. Cennini’s writing was so thorough and accurate that art forgers, including the notorious Eric Hebborn, used it as a manual for creating plausible forgeries that would not raise the alert of art experts. Today, the term fresco rather carelessly applies to almost all kinds of wall painting. Contemporary artists rarely use it, preferring more modern and durable materials. However, fresco painting still survives as an art form used in church decoration.

Cennini called fresco the most impressive kind of work and described the process in detail, starting with preparing the wall for painting. The base for a fresco should be covered with a water and lime solution. The surface should be spread thickly and have a rough texture that would allow the colors to cling. Then, the artist should measure the treated surface and mark it before transferring the sketch to a still-wet plaster base. The artist should carefully evaluate their time since plaster dries relatively past. As noted by Cennini, sometimes in winter, cold temperatures can slow down the process, giving the painter up to two days to finish, yet it would be careless to rely on the weather too much. If the base gets too dry, the artist has to either wet it with water or reapply.

Paint used for frescoes is usually a simple mixture of pigment and water. Wet plaster absorbs paint naturally. Thus, the surface needs neither a binder nor a top coating to fix the painted surface. Cennini also noted that some artists painted in dry plaster using tempera paint. Although such a method gave a painter significantly more time to render their composition, the resulting images were less bright and less durable than those painted on a wet base.

Apart from painting, some artists carved out fragments of plaster base to give more depth to certain elements of work like architectural details or background objects. The long list of celebrated artists who used the fresco technique includes Tintoretto and Raphael, Carracci and Botticelli, and many others.

Along with mosaics, surviving Pompeii frescoes gave archeologists and visitors a glimpse into the well-developed culture of the city and the lives of its inhabitants. Due to their durability, many Pompeii frescoes survived the Mount Vesuvius eruption and were preserved under layers of ash and stone. As excavation continues, archeologists find more and more of such frescoes, uncovering new aspects of the locals’ lives.

Many affluent Pompeiians had personal shrines to gods inside their houses, with images of deities and their attributes painted on walls. Many frescoes were painted in public areas to decorate or to indicate the areas’ purposes, such as with pornographic images found on the walls of brothels. Some images were used as methods of visually enlarging small spaces. Frescoes found inside small rooms often include realistic images of windows, gardens, and galleries. Political propaganda through images was not foreign to Pompeii locals. For years, one of the well-known frescoes was mistaken for an advertisement in the baker’s shop. In reality, the scene of bread distribution to the crowd was a political gesture, showing a local politician giving away bread to poor citizens.

Da Vinci’s Frescoes

Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci did not leave behind many painted works. Of those that remained, one of the most famous works is actually a fresco. Painted inside the Santa Maria delle Grazie convent in Milan in 1498, The Last Supper reflected (and unfortunately, suffered from) the too-careful approach of its master. Da Vinci was known as a slow and careful painter; thus, the traditional fresco technique did not give him enough time to work properly. For that reason, he painted The Last Supper with tempera paint, which negatively affected the vibrancy of colors and the work’s lifespan. Due to humidity and bad ventilation in the rooms, the plaster on The Last Supper had already started to flake in the 1520s. By the 1650s, the image was allegedly unrecognizable and was so damaged that the convent friars cut a doorway through it, believing it was lost beyond repair.

A notorious failure of da Vinci was his competition against another legendary artist of his time, Michelangelo Buonarroti. In 1504, both Leonardo and Michelangelo were commissioned to paint battle scenes next to one another. Their mutual dislike and cult status did not help to make the process more delightful for everyone involved. While working, Leonardo made a crucial mistake. He decided to test a new paint composition, which caused the painted image to peel off the wall almost immediately. Thankfully, Michelangelo did not even start to paint his work, as he was called on an urgent commission from Florence to Rome.

In the 1920s, the Mexican government started to employ artists to forge the visual expression of Mexican national identity. Artists like Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros brought together the Indigenous culture of Mexico, European influences that came with the Spanish colonization and contact with the West, and contemporary concerns of Mexicans. Then, the overwhelming majority of Mexicans could not read; thus, the artworks had to be clear and understandable enough for those without an impressive intellectual background. The most functional form of art for such purposes was public art.

Some artists who represented the Mexican Muralism movement revived the technique of fresco in their works. Easy to handle and durable, fresco was also a cultural bridge between Europe and Mexico, the one that, unlike colonization, was consciously chosen by Mexican artists. While using a European technique, their iconography, style, and subject matter were usually based on Mexican indigenous myths. Thus, artists symbolically added their stories and characters to the larger canon of world art history that excluded non-Western countries for too long.

Restoration and Conservation of Fresco Paintings

Restoration of frescoes is a complicated yet necessary process for those intending to preserve precious wall paintings. The more famous and beloved the fresco, the more caution is expected from restoration teams. The legendary Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo, created in 1512, required restoration already a century later due to the leaking chapel ceiling. Afraid to damage the paintings, local painter Simone Lagi rubbed the ceiling with linen cloths and bread, trying to absorb the dirt. The most extensive restoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling began in 1980 and took 14 years to complete. For more than a decade, researchers studied the paintings and cleaned them from candle wax and soot. They also reinforced the plaster layer by injecting it with resin and returned Michelangelo’s colors to their supposed original state, using the same natural pigments he had available.

In the case of Pompeii’s frescoes, restoration teams have to consider several additional factors. First, some frescoes buried underneath ash and stone fell victim to underground waters that found their way through the debris. Moisture trapped under the rubble led some of the walls to collapse, ruining the paintings on them. In some cases, warmth and humidity led to the development of bacteria dangerous for both artworks and humans. In 2015, archeologists had to treat some of the frescoes with antibiotics to neutralize the threat.

Another issue is the previous generations of archeologists. By present-day standards, each action of a conservator should be reversible and correspond as closely as possible to the original state of the work. Preserving objects as intact as possible is also crucially important. This, however, was not the case with early archeologists of the 19th century. They removed fragments of walls and paintings to transfer away from the sites to museums and sometimes restored images without a clear understanding of original compositions, based solely on expectations. Today, art conservators carefully study the remaining images and work in collaboration with climate experts who monitor humidity and pollution in the area.