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Fresco paintings

The creation of Fresco paintings

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The fresco technique consists in painting on the wet plaster of walls: the colour is chemically incorporated and preserved within the wall for an unlimited time.

 

The main difficulty with this technique is that you must not have any second thoughts: once you have applied a colour it will be absorbed by the wet plaster and the chemical reaction known as carbonatation (the plaster comes in contact with carbon dioxide in the air and turns into calcium carbonate, giving the wall a marmoreal effect, withholding the colour) occurs within three hours from the layering of plaster therefore the artist must be very fast in carrying out the painting. In order to avoid this problem the artist must first make smaller portions of the fresco dividing the job into days. Any corrections on the painting may be carried out once it is dried through the use of tempera applied on the dry plaster. However the tempera is highly degradable.