Description and technical procedures to create frescoes, the tear-off method to make these paintings transferable onto fresh plaster, furnishing every room with taste.
Mural frescoes
The fresco is a particular painting of very ancient origins performed on still fresh plaster which chemically incorporates the color in its pores allowing it to be preserved for generally very long periods.
The main elements for its realization are therefore a support, the plaster and the color.
The substrate, which can be a stone or brick wall, is important for it to be dry and without differences in height.
Before spreading the plaster layer on the wall, proceed with the preparation of a mortar obtained by the union of slaked lime, coarse or pozzolan sand and water which is subsequently spread, maintaining a thickness of about one centimeter.
The plaster is instead the defined load-bearing element for the entire fresco, composed of fine sand, marble dust, pozzolana sieved, lime and water.
The colors used to paint the fresco, of a mineral nature, are still applied wet, to better resist the alkaline nature of the lime itself.
The painter who uses this technique must be very sure of himself as no hesitation or rethinking is allowed, due to the fact that, once a color mark is left, this will be absorbed immediately by the plaster, thus not allowing for subsequent corrections .
Since carbonation takes place a few hours after the plaster has been applied, the fresco is made in portions, of a size that allows them to be completed during the reference day, before drying takes place.
In reality, some retouching can also be carried out dry, using special tempera to be applied to the now dry plaster, but this is highly discouraged, as the colors would be easily degradable over time.
To optimize the color tones, it should be taken into account that the colors appear darker on wet plaster, while after drying the whitening effect of the lime will make the colors lighter.
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Once created, the fresco can also be torn and reported on canvas or on another support, allowing in fact also its removal.
To do this, Calicot's method is used, which consists in first gluing a canvas on the finished dry fresco, to obtain the negative of the subject, which will serve to positively bring the work back to another canvas or different support of various guy.
Calicot, also called grandmother's rag, is a light raw cotton fabric.
When we talk about the sale of frescoes we generally mean the proposal of a fresco torn from a wall or a wall tear of a fresco representing trompe l'oeil or classic subjects such as hunting scenes, battles, cherubs and still lifes.
The fresco technique is not widely used today, due to the considerable technical difficulties to obtain good final results, contrary to what happened in past centuries.
In paleo-Christian and medieval times the wall was prepared very quickly, directly drawing the figures on the preparation of the plaster itself, first tracing the outlines in ocher color and then proceeding to fill them to reach the shadows.
The evolution of the scaffolding, in the construction site created specifically to create the fresco, determined pictorial joints due to the displacement of the same.
In the Romanesque era, however, while continuing the frescoes to use scaffolding and therefore to create the "piece" fresco, the technique was refined by introducing straw, shards and cloth into the mixture of the arriccio and the plaster. , to preserve the humidity for a longer time in order to obtain a longer painting time.
While continuing to outline the figures with a reddish ocher outline, adhesives are also used, for the colors consisting mainly of egg white, melted wax and glue of animal origin.
During the fourteenth century, the fresco technique expanded more in central and southern Europe with the introduction of the sinopia, intended as a preparatory drawing for the actual drafting of color, and work by the day, rather than by bridges as had happened until then.
The sinopias were made with a brush with red earth from Sinope, first on the curl and then on the plaster, reproducing exactly the figures of the fresco.
Their existence was discovered after the Second World War, with the first detachments of the frescoes made for restoration purposes, which highlighted the underlying drawings.
Making a good fresco required, by the workers called to make it, careful planning, having to decide which part of the subject to perform before applying the plaster, evaluating the execution time in order to establish its feasibility in the day, before drying of the plaster.
In the medieval frescoes both the days and the bridges are detectable.
Through particular techniques, the joints between the days and the bridges were masked.
Once the fresco was completed, with completely dry plaster, retouches were made.
This way of proceeding has often made it possible to establish, with a good approximation, the home school or even the artist executing the work.
The fresco spread in Italy especially in the Renaissance, when the use of the sinopia was abandoned in favor of the preparatory cartoon.
With the preparatory cardboard technique, the fresco was reproduced in full on the cardboard in full size, perforating the lines that outlined the figures, so as to allow the passage of coal dust, specially used in order to obtain a trace to follow on the fresh plaster, to accurately proceed with the distribution of the color by brush.
