They produced murals, not frescoes, the plaster on which they applied their paint having to be dry, not wet, with the consequence that the paintings have an extraordinary fragility.
For 60 years the murals -- not frescoes, since they were not painted in fresh plaster but in a compound made from cheese -- went undetected in the Villa Landau, as the building came to be known.
It is a painting, not a fresco.
When Marine infantry go ashore in the lcac, they're seated in windowless steel compartments, not al fresco with sea spray in their faces, because anybody on deck could be sucked into the giant fans.
The oil medium, introduced to northern Italy by Antonello da Messina and quickly adopted by Venetian painters who could not use fresco because of the damp climate, seemed particularly adapted to the sanguine, pleasure-loving culture of Venice.
The painting in your house is almost certainly not a fresco, which is an elaborate technique of painting on fresh lime plaster that has rarely been practiced in the U.S. The painting is, more properly, a wall painting (an image created on a dry wall with a painting medium that may be oil, tempera, acrylic, etc).
Da Vinci's painted scene is actually not a fresco, but a mural.
A staff member at the site said that the walls, a combination of ancient stone and mortar, did not contain frescoes.
Yet on the 50th anniversary of his death, this city is in the midst of a series of exhibitions celebrating his work, a tribute that shows his wide range, including not just frescoes, but also paintings, watercolors, sketches and even magazine covers.
When such burials were not possible, frescoes were an acceptable substitute: Guidoriccio da Fogliano was painted on horseback by Simone Martini in Palazzo Pubblico in Siena in 1328; Pietro Farnese was depicted in a papier-mâché equestrian monument atop a sarcophagus in the Florence Cathedral in 1363.
