Al fresco
ART PAUL GRINKE
Two hundred years ago a Bolognese aca- demician called Giampetro Zanotti recorded the following heartfelt message about a recent discovery : 'If this beautiful art dies with its creator, this will be a grievous loss. But if it lives and can be propagated, every city which has beautiful mural paintings will bless Ferrara where there was discovered a means of saving from destruction the notable works of art for which this country more than any other is renowned.' The discovery he referred to was the strappo method of removing frescoes, a skill- which has been handed down to a few master craftsmen and has made possible the present magnificent exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.
Since the technique of fresco is so unlike the kind of mediaeval wall painting we are familiar with in England, it may be worth summarising Professor Ugo Procacci's detailed account of the process and the methods of re- moving mural paintings. True fresco, as any- one with a smattering of restaurant Italian might have surmised, is a method of painting a mural on intonaco, or plaster, while it is still 'fresh' or wet. The chemical reaction which takes place as the plaster dries bonds the colour irremovably into the actual surface of the plaster, creating a kind of skin of colour. It is the earliest technique of mural painting and is described in detail by Cennino Cen- nini, a fourteenth century artist, in his hand- book the Libro dell'Arte. Most of the murals in the exhibition were created in this way but, as artists took stock of their position in society and decided that such a technique was really only worth a common labourer's hire, a new process of painting a secco on dry smooth plaster took its place.
The difference is more than a matter of technique and execution, as Michelangelo realised when he painted the Sistine Last Judgment in the old style, exclaiming 'oil painting' (which was widely employed in the secco technique) 'is for women and slow and slovenly people.' With true fresco only so much of the painting can be. achieved while the. plaster remains wet, and there is no margin for error at all. The artists who had the con- fidence to work in this difficult medium had to have a complete grasp of the day's work in their mind, and an incredible assurance of the hand and brush. The only props they em- ployed were the sinopie or underlying outline sketches which have only recently been re- vealed and now stand proudly in their own right by the side of the finished murals.
The Hayward exhibition comes to us as a gesture of thanks from Florence after the appalling debacle of two years ago, with a' financial boost from British Olivetti Ltd. The original conception of a travelling exhibition was formulated before the floods (one hesi- tates'to call it antediluvian), but the actual work of removing the frescoes was given a terrible urgency by the insidious action of water, oil and mineral salts which made speedy removal a necessity. The two techniques of stacco and strappo for removing frescoes are well tried, but still incredible to the layman and by no means infallible. Originally frescoes were trans-. ferred, in the face of demolition or even at a nobleman's whim, by a cumbrous process of removing the whole wall and binding it with chains. The discovery that Zanotti recorded with such enthusiasm in the eighteenth century was the removal .of the actual paint layer, the colour-impregnated skin of the plaster, without bringing the whole wall with it. It was achieved in much the same way as the stacco method of removing all the plaster with the painting from the bricks, but was obviously much more dangerous. The process consists of coating the paint surface with a powerful ad- hesive and attaching to it a thick layer of canvas. The plaster is then carefully pounded, to loosen it from the brickwork, and the canvas and plaster peeled from the wall. The frescoes usually appear far brighter than ever before as the adhesive removes all the grit and dust which covered the painting: and the sinopie are revealed for the first time since the artist's original execution. It is in every way a remarkable exhibition and includes most of the great names of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in fresco painting. They range from Giotto, hailed by Vasari as 'the true restorer of the art of paint- ing,' through Orcagna, Taddeo Gaddi, Uccello and Fra Angelico up to the proto-baroqua master Pontormo.
There are so many finc things that it would be invidious to single out par- ticular works, but Piero della Francesca's St Julian, the extraordinary Trinity by Andrea del Castagno with its drastically foreshortened Christ, and the great cycle of frescoes by Andrea del Sarto from the Chiostro allo Scalso, which fill an entire room at the Hayward with an almost monastic quiet, are unforgettable. It is altogether a most welcome gesture from Florence, and one that it would be positively churlish to miss.
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