11) Oil painting with fresco technique Written by Rainer: rainer.lehrer@yahoo.com Learn languages (via Skype): Rainer: + 36 20 549 52 97 or + 36 20 334 79 74

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Oil painting with fresco technique Let us first take a closer look at these two pictures from different periods of painting and compare the drawing technique used! One is a picture of Sandro Botticelli, who was born in Florence in 1445 and died there in 1510. The other is a picture of Henry Raeburn, who was born in Stockbridge in 1756 and died in Edinburgh in 1823. Botticelli was a painter of the advanced Renaissance, a time when fresco painting flourished in Italy. This type of painting had specialized in walls on and in buildings. In general, they only existed in the warm south of Europe. A thin layer of fresh gypsum was put onto the wall to be painted (hence the name fresco = fresh) and painted on because the fresh covering was soaking up the colour. The disadvantage of this method was, of course, that the paint ran on the surface, the amount of paint sucked in was very difficult to calculate and could only be corrected by removing the entire plaster layer. That is why the painters made use of contour lines, for example to visibly separate different parts of the body. This type of wall painting was not widely used in the Alps or in the northern part of Central Europe because the damp climate would have soaked the works in a very short time. There, they soon turned their attention to wood or canvas as the basis. The paint applied, which in a fresco is more like a watercolour, i.e. mixed with water, was now dissolved in a special oil in canvas painting. This oil paint was of course much more viscous and did not run over the canvas. This enabled a painting technique in which even more emphasis could be placed on details (just think of the German, Alfred Dürer). Giorgio Vasari, who had travelled all over Italy and described almost all works of late Gothic and Renaissance in his book "the best painters, sculptors and architects", tells in that book that many Italian artists went to Holland and Belgium in particular to learn this new way of painting. Some of these travelling painters came back to Italy to make this art known at home too. And this is what we can see at Botticelli’s painting now. The painting that I list here as an example is an oil painting with applied fresco technique. Back to list!

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