Painting on Wet Walls
1Imagine painting a picture that becomes part of a wall. That is what artists do when they paint a fresco. The word fresco comes from an Italian word that means "fresh." A fresco is painted on fresh, wet plaster, the smooth paste that covers many walls.
2Painting a fresco takes careful planning. First, the artist makes a full-size drawing on large sheets of paper. These drawings are called cartoons, even though they are not meant to be funny. The artist pokes tiny holes along every line of the drawing and then cuts it into pieces.
3Each morning, a helper spreads a fresh layer of plaster over one part of the wall. The artist holds the matching piece of the cartoon against the wet plaster and pats charcoal dust over the holes. When the paper comes down, rows of tiny dots show where the lines go. Then the painting begins. The colors are made from powders, such as ground-up minerals, mixed with water. They soak into the damp plaster.
4The artist must work fast. As the plaster dries, it hardens and locks the colors inside it. Paint brushed on after the plaster has dried does not soak in, so it can flake off over time. For this reason, the artist covers only as much wall as can be painted in one day. In Italian, each of these patches is called a giornata, which means "a day's work." On some old frescoes, you can still see faint edges where one day's patch meets the next.
5Mistakes are hard to fix. If an artist is unhappy with a patch, the only way to change it is to chip off that plaster and start the section again.
6All this hard work pays off. Because the colors are part of the wall itself, a fresco can last for hundreds of years. Ancient Romans painted frescoes in their homes, and some of those paintings can still be seen today. Many famous frescoes were painted in Italy about five hundred years ago, and visitors travel from far away to see them. Artists in other countries, such as Mexico, have also used fresco to paint huge murals on public buildings.