Maria Gabriella Matarazzo // Beyond “Buon Fresco”: Experimenting with Oil in Renaissance Mural Painting (c. 1500–1650)
My project centers on oil mural painting, an experimental technique that captivated the pictorial intelligence and challenged the technical ingenuity of some of the most complex and impactful artists of the early modern period, from Leonardo da Vinci to Caravaggio.
As the first book-length study dedicated to this elusive painting technique, my project disputes one of the most persistent and misleading ideas inherited from Renaissance art theory: that the vast majority, if not all murals of the period were painted in fresco, to the point that still today, by way of metonymy, the word “fresco” is used to refer to any mural. Recent restoration campaigns, however, have highlighted the heterogeneity of the early modern processes of wall painting: from Raphael’s Vatican Rooms to Guido Reni’s Aurora in the Casino Pallavicini Rospigliosi, the strikingly rich mixture of fresco and secco techniques, along with the unexpected use of certain materials for pigments, binders, and wall-priming, have rendered the established narratives of early modern mural painting obsolete, requiring its urgent rewriting in light of such exciting new evidence.
This project moves a decisive step forward in this direction. Drawing on new archival findings, a comprehensive analysis of early modern art literature, and insights from recent restoration works, my research explores the main alternative to fresco within the typology of wall painting - oil. Freeing artists from the procedural and stylistic constraints intrinsic to the fresco, oil paint allowed artists to achieve deeper nuances and richer visual effects, thus enabling the transfer of the formal and expressive explorations possible in easel painting onto the wall. However, the trade-off was a higher degree of perishability: When applied to walls, oil paint proved to be particularly unstable and more subject to the ravages of damp walls and moist air. This negotiation between artistic freedom and the quest for longevity is a central focus of my project, along with an investigation of the artist’s creative agency in relation to oil paint’s material agency. Thus, by exploring the over a century-long quest to perfect the oil-on-wall procedure, the project intends to demonstrate the role this little understood medium played as a site of experimentation and innovation in Italian Renaissance art, one that challenged in its philosophy and craft the very notion of wall painting.