How to Read a Fresco

Begin with the technique, because it determines everything about what you are looking at. A buon fresco — a true fresco — is painted on wet plaster. The pigment bonds chemically with the lime as it dries, becoming part of the wall itself rather than sitting on its surface. This is why frescoes sealed behind altarpieces for centuries emerge looking nearly as fresh as the day they were made, while sections exposed to damp and air have faded or been lost. The area painted in one session is called a giornata: a day’s work. If you look closely at the join between two giornate, you can see a hairline seam in the plaster, usually running along a drapery fold or a figure’s contour. These seams are a map of the painting’s making — how many days it took, in what order the sections were done, where the artist started and where he finished.

The Colours That Changed

Lead white turns black with age; azurite blue turns green as it oxidises. The most stable colours are the earth pigments — ochres, siennas, umbers, iron reds. These are what they were. Everything else has been in conversation with time.

Where to Look for the Artist

Florentine painters had a habit of placing themselves in their own work. Botticelli stands at the far right of the Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi, looking directly out. Ghirlandaio includes himself in the fresco of the Last Supper at Ognissanti. Look for the figure at the edge of the composition who faces outward when all the others face in.

Three Rooms Worth Returning To

The Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine is where Western painting changed. Masaccio’s frescoes, painted in the 1420s, introduced a new spatial logic — the figures have weight, the light comes from a single source, the faces are portraits of real people. Every major Florentine artist studied here for a century after Masaccio’s death. Michelangelo drew here. The cells of San Marco — Fra Angelico’s frescoes painted for the Dominican friars — work on the opposite principle. They are not public art; never meant to be seen except by the monk who lived in each cell. Each image is spare, still, inward. The gold has gone. What remains is thought. The Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trinita is Ghirlandaio at his most human — religious scenes barely an excuse for a group portrait of Florence in the 1480s, with Lorenzo de’ Medici looking on. The Arno bridges are recognisable. The fashions are documented. It is a photograph of a city, made with egg and lime and ground earth.

The Restorer in the Room Above You

The frescoes at This Time Tomorrow Abitazione were restored by Kety Ghinassi — a Florentine painter and conservator whose work moves between private commissions and some of the most significant restorations in the city. In the months before the Abitazione opened, Kety worked room by room through the painted ceilings. At the same time, she was engaged on the restoration of the ceiling of the Cappella Salviati in the Basilica of San Marco — the same building that houses Fra Angelico’s cells, a few hundred metres from the residence.

Kety is prepared to meet guests at the Abitazione and talk through what she finds in ceilings and what the restoration at Abitazione, and beyond, involved. Arranged through Eric.