“If the drawing is wrong, the fresco is wrong.” With that,
master craftsman and fresco instructor Walter O’Neill began a fresco workshop
that I attended a few weeks ago at the Morgan Library & Museum, in New York
City. Fresco painting has become somewhat of a lost art over the centuries even
though many great art masterpieces have been created in buon or “true”
fresco, the painting technique in which pigments are dissolved in only water
and painted directly onto a wet lime-plaster wall. As the wall dries, the
chemical reaction between the plaster and the air allows the pigments to fuse
directly into the wall. Leonard’s The
Last Supper, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel works, and Raphael’s School of Athens were all created in
this manner.
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