Medieval Frescos
On a recent trip to Italy, celebrating Edward’s 40th birthday, our main focus was exploring and discovering some of the remarkable surviving frescos found in Italy’s numerous ancient and medieval, chapels and churches. This form of artwork and image creating is something we are both really interested in and as a special treat during our time there, we attended a fresco making workshop, learning about the fascinating methods and techniques involved in making them. We learned how walls were prepared by mixing certain ingredients together to form a lime plaster and then experienced using natural earth pigments as paints, applying them to wet plaster where they react with the lime to create a durable and permanent layer of colour. Some of these pigments have been part of the artist palette since the very beginning of humans expressing themselves on the walls of caves and due to their composition, are very stable, unreactive to lime and incredibly resistant to fading.
The combination of the qualities of the plaster and the permanency of earth pigments means that these paintings can last on a wall for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Making and painting fresco is a delightful way of working, slowly applying colour to create the intended image, building up layers of colour before the plaster dries out. It also requires a fair degree of skill to prepare, and then work on the moist plaster before it sets and no longer holds the pigment. This has very much increased our appreciation of frescos, fresco painters and wall paintings more broadly.
We saw numerous examples of ancient frescos, gleefully encountered when exploring the region where we were staying. It was a fantastic experience to see such old paintings, or what remained of after being painted so many centuries ago.
An aspect of this craft will feature as part of our upcoming two day workshop in Whithorn, looking at how interiors of early medieval chapels in Scotland may have been painted. We can’t wait to share it with the group of participants!
