Fresco Painting for a Wall Mural

Video Transcript

"Mural painting is an art form about as old as dirt and the oldest recorded mural that we have today is--would be the cave paintings in Lascaux, in France which are pre-historic. No one can agree on how old they actually are but they're pretty old. The closest thing to a modern painting, mural that we have would be the frescoes that were so popular in Crete and Italy around the Middle Ages, 1500s, and there were two basic types of fresco. You had the "buon fresco" which meant that they would paint actually on the wet plaster and then "a secco" which means dry. Buon frescoes sort of went out of vogue, first of all, because it's terribly, terribly time-consuming. Here's an example of a buon fresco. This is from the famous city of Pompeii and as you can see, the colors have been preserved pretty incredibly well. Now this is an example of buon fresco. The pigment would actually be applied to the plaster while it was still wet and so it would bind much better to the wall. You can see here that it's been applied in sections. That's because you had to work in a section small enough that you could finish it all before the plaster actually dried, so it's actually very rare to find one in as good condition as this is here because the different sections of plaster have a tendency to break away from the wall. The other type of fresco is called a secco which means applied dry. Now these were used in paintings that required either a much larger space--this is from the Island of Crete. This is an example of an a secco fresco and you can tell because, first of all, you won't see as many separations where the plaster was applied in sections. These would have been done all in one piece, not in sections as we saw with the buon fresco. And another clue is that there's a lot of blue in this mural, and blue was a pigment that was very difficult to achieve at the time. They didn't have the wonderful pigments and polymers that we use today. And so the two main pigments were azul and lapis and they didn't react well with wet plasters so they could really only be achieved after the plaster had dried so this would, ergo, have to be an a secco fresco."