Murals, Frescoes, and Easel Paintings

Murals are pictures on walls or ceilings that become a part of the building’s architectural decoration. Archaeologists have excavated and saved mural paintings from Pompeii and Herculaneum, cities that were buried by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. Unfortunately, outdoor painting of any kind has little chance of surviving the effects of the environment for very long Richard Haas’s famous mural Homage to Cincinnatus, which was painted in 1983 and is displayed on the Brotherhood Building in Cincinnati in the United States, has faded considerably. Indoors, where walls can be kept dry, murals have traditionally done much better when they were painted in fresco. The Italian word fresco means “fresh.” Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted in the sixteenth century, is a perfect example of fresco painting. In true fresco, water-based paints are applied to fresh, wet plaster so that the pigment (color) soaks into the plaster. The paint actually becomes part of the wall. The lime of the plaster, changing to calcium carbonate when it dries, binds the pigments permanently in the wall. The colors are matte, not glossy. They stay bright for hundreds of years, and as long as the wall lasts, the fresco lasts.

Paint applied to the wall when it is dry is not very permanent. Since some pigments will not combine properly in fresco, they have to be applied by the artist. The blue pigment that Giotto used in The Nativity , fresco portraying the birth of Jesus Christ, would not mix with the lime in plaster, so he had to paint it on the dry plaster. As a consequence, the blue of the sky and the blue of Mary’s robe have almost all flaked off. Since true fresco must be painted on wet plaster, an artist can work on only a small portion of the wall where the plaster was freshly applied beforehand. A normal area for a day’s work might be about one or two square yards, although the size depends on the complexity of the painting. Some days a fresco painter might complete only a head. In Giotto’s fresco The Nativity, the breaks between one day’s work and the next are visible on close inspection.

Fresco painting takes a lot of preparation because artists have to have the entire composition worked out before they get started on an individual patch of plaster. In addition to the usual preliminary drawings, fresco painter also makes cartoons-d on paper in the same scale as the mural-so that the essential lines of the composition can be traced and transferred to the wall.

Most artists produce easel paintings-painting that are painted on a portable wooden support-that are intended to be hung on a wall. Bernardo Daddi painted the three-part Madonna and Child (Jesus Christ and mother) for use during private prayer Originally, it may have rested on a table. After their prayers, the artwork owners could have folded the sides together to store it or carry it to another location.

When Daddi and other European artists in the fourteenth century wanted to create an easel painting, they usually worked on carefully prepared wooden panels. Wooden panels assembled from several planks and as large as ten to twelve feet high were common in that era. The wood had to be dried, aged, and sealed so that it would become an acceptable painting surface, as smooth as polished marble. Daddi mixed his pigments with egg yolk, a medium that is called egg tempera. If the panel received decent treatment over the years, a 650-year-old egg tempera such as Madonna and Child will have colors that are still preserved and fresh. Egg tempera is quite a permanent medium.

Egg tempera paint dries as fast as egg yolk dries on a breakfast plate and is just as stubborn to remove. An artist applies it in short strokes because of the rapid drying time, and by the time the artist comes back to the panel with the next brushstroke, the preceding one has already dried. Little blending is possible, and the only way to remove a mistake is by scraping it off. Every stroke has to be meticulously placed with small brushes.?

1.Murals are pictures on walls or ceilings that become a part of the building’s architectural decoration. Archaeologists have excavated and saved mural paintings from Pompeii and Herculaneum, cities that were buried by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. Unfortunately, outdoor painting of any kind has little chance of surviving the effects of the environment for very long Richard Haas’s famous mural Homage to Cincinnatus, which was painted in 1983 and is displayed on the Brotherhood Building in Cincinnati in the United States, has faded considerably. Indoors, where walls can be kept dry, murals have traditionally done much better when they were painted in fresco. The Italian word fresco means “fresh.” Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted in the sixteenth century, is a perfect example of fresco painting. In true fresco, water-based paints are applied to fresh, wet plaster so that the pigment (color) soaks into the plaster. The paint actually becomes part of the wall. The lime of the plaster, changing to calcium carbonate when it dries, binds the pigments permanently in the wall. The colors are matte, not glossy. They stay bright for hundreds of years, and as long as the wall lasts, the fresco lasts.