Fresco.

Fresco. Fresco-painting is the art of painting with colours, consisting chiefly of natural earths, upon walls covered with damp, freshly laid plaster. The art of painting upon plaster surfaces is of great antiquity. The sides of the Etruscan tombs were coated with lime and decorated in this manner; the same method was employed in Egypt and in many of the mural paintings of Pompeii; and the process was continued by the early Italian painters, and is that known as secco or fresco secco. It is described as follows in a treatise upon painting by the monk known as Theophilus, a work certainly written before the close of the 12th century: 'When figures or other objects are drawn on a dry wall, the surface should be first sprinkled with water till it is quite moist. While the wall is in this state, the colours are to be applied, all the tints being mixed with lime, and drying as the wall dries, in order that they may adhere.' The method is still in general use in Italy and in Munich, for the production of both exterior and interior decoration. In modern practice lime and fine sand are used for the final coating of plaster, which is allowed to dry thoroughly, and then smoothed by the application of pumice-stone. On the evening before the painter is to begin his work the surface is thoroughly damped with water in which a little lime has been dissolved, and the process is again repeated next morning. The colours are the same as those used in true fresco-painting, which we next describe; but fresco secco possesses this advan- tage over true fresco, that the artist can leave his work at any point, and, having simply redamped the wall, again resume it. The secco process is excellently adapted for rough decorative work, and is as durable as true fresco; but it is less suited for delicate and refined artistic productions.

True fresco, the buon fresco of the Italians, did not come into use till about the close of the 14th century; and the subjects from Genesis by Pietro d'Orvieto, in the Campo Santo, Pisa, to which the date of 1390 has been assigned, are regarded as the earliest extant works in the method. In true fresco the plaster is laid fresh and damp every morning on the wall. Upon this surface the artist places his full-sized outline cartoon, and transfers its forms, by pouncing or by tracing with the blunted point of a style, to the moist plaster. He then proceeds to fill in the outlines of his design with the brush, guided by a small coloured study which he has previously prepared. At the close of his day's work the portions of the plaster ground which he has not covered are carefully scraped away, and before the painting is resumed a fresh surface is laid. Care is taken that the lines of junction in the plaster shall occur in the shadows, or coincide with the contours of the figures, so that they may not unduly attract attention; and the frequent occurrence of such joinings in a mural painting is one of the most obvious tests of its having been executed in true fresco. As he can use only such colours as resist the decomposing action of lime, the palette of the fresco-painter is far more restricted in range than that of the painter in oils. His white is simply a finely-prepared lime; his yellows, the ochres; his reds, the ochres burned, with cinabre and sinopia, both earths; his green, terra vert; his black, lampblack and charcoal; his blue, ultramarine and cobalt; and in the application of these he is obliged to make allowance for their becoming paler in tone as the ground of plaster dries. He must also work lightly, so as not to injure his surface, and avoid retouching as far as possible, as only a certain proportion of moist colour can be properly incorporated by the plaster, and if this proportion is exceeded the pigments remain unfixed upon the surface. When properly applied the colours enter into complete combination with the lime of the plaster. Thus, a painting in fresco can be washed without injury; and with ordinary care, in a southern climate and upon a properly built wall, the process is a very permanent one.

In the fine arts generally, the material conditions of the process employed have the most powerful effect upon the temper of the artist; and in the imitative arts they go far to determine the particular qualities of visible things which the artist shall be inevitably led to emphasise. This is especially the case in regard to the process which we are considering. The rapidity of handling necessary in fresco-painting upon a damp surface of fresh plaster, and the practical impossibility of correction except by the summary method of cutting away the faulty portion and relaying it with a new plaster ground, necessitated the clearest apprehension on the part of the painter of what he meant to perform, and was as stringent a discipline as could well be imagined in certainty and decision of handling. Again, the process rendered impossible any trivial finesse of mere imitative dexterity. Reproduction of the niceties of texture, for instance, a legitimate enough aim for the oil-painter of cabinet-sized subjects, and one which his process enabled him to attain, was beyond the scope of the fresco-painter's method; who was accordingly led to concentrate his attention upon other things—upon nobility of design, dignity of grouping, expressiveness of gesture and countenance—in fact, upon the very qualities proper to that class of monumental mural work for which fresco was employed in Italy. Further, his process led him to seek for colour rather than for chiar-oscuro; and the restriction of his palette to a comparatively few pigments, and these mainly natural earths, tended towards that simplicity and pure harmony of colouring proper to paintings covering large surfaces and employed as an architectural adjunct—a result facilitated by the softening influence of the lime with which the colours combined, and by the fine, dead, lustreless surface of the plaster ground.

Fresco-painting was accordingly the chosen method by which the greatest Italian masters expressed, upon the walls of cathedral and council-room, their deepest conceptions of religion and polity. Giotto employed it in the Arena Chapel of Padua and the church of St Francis at Assisi; Orcagna in the church of S. Maria Novella, Fra Angelico in the Convent of St Mark, Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine, Gozzoli in the Riccardi Chapel, at Florence; Perugino in the Sala del Cambio of his native city; Luini in the churches of Milan, Lugano, and Saronno; Pinturicchio in the cathedral library of Siena; Correggio in the cathedral of Parma; Raphael in the Vatican: and when Michael Angelo was directed by Pope Paul III. to paint his 'Last Judgment' in the Sistine Chapel in oils, instead of in fresco as at first agreed on, he protested that oil-painting was an art for women and indolent persons, that fresco was the art for men and painters, and was allowed to have his way. The celebrated 'Last Supper' of Leonardo at Milan is a mural painting in oils, not fresco; and the method used, combined with the fact that the production of the work extended over a period of years, and that the faulty masonry of the wall afforded insufficient protection against damp, accounts for the ruined state in which the subject now exists.

While, however, the qualities which we have indicated above are those peculiar to fresco-painting executed on newly-laid plaster, and are characteristic of works substantially carried out in this method, it is seldom that we find the process employed in its absolute purity, entirely unsupplemented by other modes of execution. From the earliest times the Italian painters have been unable to resist the temptation of adding more of detail and enrichment than the rapidity of true fresco rendered possible. In a greater or less degree they all retouched their frescoes with distemper colour, in which pigments were mixed with a vehicle of albumen and yoke of egg, with fig-tree juice, and with gum tragacanth, and applied at leisure, after the plaster had become dry—a practice which tended to lessen the permanence of the work. In the treatise on painting by Cennini (1437) it is stated that distemper was always used in the completion of frescoes; and these retouchings are styled a secco by Vasari, a phrase to be distinguished from the fresco secco already described. The works of Masaccio may be taken as examples of paintings executed in what is practically true fresco with little retouching; while Pinturicchio's subjects in the cathedral library at Siena show the largest introduction of distemper, further heightened by gilding.

In modern times the processes of fresco were introduced into Germany by Cornelius, Overbeck, Veit, and F. W. Shadlow, who had learned the art at Rome, and had there decorated the Casa Bartoldi, the palace of the consul-general of Prussia; and much work of the kind was executed in the north by these painters, J. Schnorr, and Kaulbach.

In England an effort was made to found a national school of mural art by the appointment of a Royal Commission for the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament at Westminster. A report was prepared embodying much valuable information regarding the various processes of fresco; cartoon competitions were held for the purpose of selecting painters capable of historic art; and Dyce, Armitage (who had aided Delaroche in his great mural painting in oils on the Hémicycle in the Palais des Beaux-arts, Paris), Watts, Cope, and other prominent painters received commissions for frescoes; but the scheme was never carried out in its entirety. The great monumental works by Maclise in the Houses of Parliament, 'The Interview of Wellington and Blücher after Waterloo' and 'The Death of Nelson,' were carried out in stereochromic or 'water-glass' painting, invented by Dr J. R. Fuchs (see GLASS, SOLUBLE), in which a painting executed in fresco secco was protected by the application of a solution of silica and potass. But, though many interesting experiments have been made, no school of fresco-painters has yet been formed in England. England's moist climate, and especially the vitiated atmosphere of London, seems almost inevitably fatal to the permanency of works executed in fresco; and while subjects painted by G. F. Watts many years ago, on the walls of a villa near Florence, are still uninjured, his frescoes, produced by exactly the same process, at Westminster and in Lincoln's Inn bear marked signs of deterioration. See CARTOON, DISTEMPER, PAINTING, MURAL DECORATION.