How to Paint a Fresco

Adam Goodheart

Although it must be painted in a very short time, a fresco will last a very long time—that is its great advantage. Many of the master­pieces of the golden age of fresco (from the 14th through the 18th centuries) are as brilliant now as when they were first painted. If you want to fresco a cathedral or palazzo today, you may have a few problems—papal and ducal commissions are scarcer than they once were, and the great Renaissance masters are no longer accepting applications for apprenticeships. Fortunately, a few of their trade secrets have come down to us through the ages.

EQUIPMENT

Lime Sand Water A trowel Paper A needle

A small bag of charcoal dust

The bristles of a white hog

The hair of bears, sables, and martens

The quills of vultures, geese, hens, and doves

Ocher, burnt grapevines, lapis lazuli

Egg yolks

Goat's milk

1. Preparing the wall. Cennino Cennini, a Tuscan master, ad­vised pupils in 1437 to "begin by decking yourselves with this at­tire: Enthusiasm, Reverence, Obedience, and Constancy." You'd do better to deck yourself with some old clothes, though, since the first stage of the process is quite messy. Soak the wall thoroughly and coat it with coarse plaster, two parts sand to one part lime, leaving the surface uneven. (Andrea Pozzo, a 17th-century expert, recommended hiring a professional mason to do this, since "the lime makes a foul odor, which is injurious to the head.")

2. Tracing your design. You should already have extensive drawings for your fresco—these will be much sought by scholars and collectors in centuries to come. Make a full-size sketch, on sturdy paper, of a section of the fresco that you can paint in a day. Then go over the drawing with a needle, pricking holes along every line. Lay a coat of fine plaster on a section of the wall corre­sponding to the location, size, and shape of the sketch, and press the sketch against the plaster. Fill a loosely woven bag with char­coal dust and strike it lightly all over the surface of the paper. Now peel the sketch off. Your design will be outlined in black dots on the wet plaster, giving you a guide for the day's work.

3. Painting. Time is of the essence: You must paint the plas­ter while it is wet, so that the pigments bind chemically with the lime. That gives you about six hours, although some painters had tricks to prolong drying. (Piero della Francesca packed the plaster with wet rags; problem was, this left indentations that are still visible after 500 years.) Use top-quality brushes. One 17th- century Flemish master recommended those made of "fish hair" (he probably meant seal fur), but most painters made brushes from bear, marten, or sable hairs inserted in hollow quills. Cen- nini suggested the bristles of a white hog for the coarser work. As for paints, every artist had his own favorite recipes, but all agreed that mineral pigments such as ocher or ground stone mixed with water were best. Avoid white lead. One 14th-century Umbrian used it to paint a nursing infant; the lime turned the white black and the milky babe into a "devilish changeling." A few pigments, such as dark blue azurite (often used for the Vir­gin Mary's mantle), must be mixed with egg yolk or goat's milk and added after the fresco is dry. Such colors will prove less durable.

Money is a consideration in choosing materials. When Michelangelo frescoed the Sistine ceiling, expenses came out of his fee, so he used cheap blue smalt for the sky. Twenty years later, when he did the Last Judgment, Michelangelo used semiprecious lapis lazuli for blue, since the pope was paying for the paint. (He made up for it by using burnt grapevines for black.)

7 4. Casualties of style. Realism, while a worthy goal, has its

perils. Spinello Aretino, a 14th-century Tuscan, is said to have painted a fresco that depicted Lucifer with such hideous accuracy that the Evil One himself came to the artist in a dream and de­manded an explanation. Spinello went half-mad with fear and died shortly thereafter. On the other hand, a Florentine woodcut from 1500 depicts a painter who has portrayed the Virgin so skill­fully that when he falls off the scaffold, she reaches out of the fresco and saves him.

WARNING

s Frescoing ceilings can be rough on your back. While working on the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo wrote a poem complaining: "I've already grown a goiter at this drudgery... With my beard toward heaven ... I am bent like a bow." Don't be discouraged, though. Bad posture is a small price to pay for immortality.

1995

Cause and Effect

How Do You Know It's Good?

Marya Mannes

Suppose there were no critics to tell us how to react to a picture, a 1 play, or a new composition of music. Suppose we wandered inno­cent as the dawn into an art exhibition of unsigned paintings. By what standards, by what values would we decide whether they were good or bad, talented or untalented, successes or failures? How can we ever know that what we think is right?

For the last fifteen or twenty years the fashion in criticism or 2 appreciation of the arts has been to deny the existence of any valid criteria and to make the words "good" or "bad" irrelevant, imma­terial, and inapplicable. There is no such thing, we are told, as a set of standards, first acquired through experience and knowledge and later imposed on the subject under discussion. This has been a pop­ular approach, for it relieves the critic of the responsibility of judg­ment and the public of the necessity of knowledge. It pleases those resentful of disciplines, it flatters the empty-minded by calling them open-minded, it comforts the confused. Under the banner of democracy and the kind of equality which our forefathers did not mean, it says, in effect, "Who are you to tell us what is good or bad?" This is the same cry used so long and so effectively by the produc­ers of mass media who insist that it is the public, not they, who de­cides what it wants to hear and see, and that for a critic to say that this program is bad and this program is good is purely a reflection of personal taste. Nobody recently has expressed this philosophy

more succinctly than Dr. Frank Stanton, the highly intelligent pres­ident of CBS television. At a hearing before the Federal Communi­cations Commission, this phrase escaped him under questioning: "One man's mediocrity is another man's good program."

3. There is no better way of saying "No values are absolute." 1 There is another important aspect to this philosophy of laissez faire: It is the fear, in all observers of all forms of art, of guessing wrong. This fear is well come by, for who has not heard of the contempo­rary outcries against artists who later were called great? Every age has its arbiters who do not grow with their times, who cannot tell evolution from revolution or the difference between frivolous faddism, amateurish experimentation, and profound and neces­sary change. Who wants to be caught flagrante delicto with an error of judgment as serious as this? It is far safer, and certainly easier, to look at a picture or a play or a poem and to say "This is hard to understand, but it may be good," or simply to welcome it as a new form. The word "new"—in our country especially—has magical connotations. What is new must be good; what is old is probably bad. And if a critic can describe the new in language that nobody can understand, he's safer still. If he has mastered the art of say­ing nothing with exquisite complexity, nobody can quote him later as saying anything.

4. But all these, I maintain, are forms of abdication from the re­sponsibility of judgment. In creating, the artist commits himself; in appreciating, you have a commitment of your own. For after all, it is the audience which makes the arts. A climate of appreciation is essential to its flowering, and the higher the expectations of the public, the better the performance of the artist. Conversely, only a public ill-served by its critics could have accepted as art and as lit­erature so much in these last years that has been neither. If any­thing goes, everything goes; and at the bottom of the junkpile lie the discarded standards too.

5. But what are these standards? How do you get them? How do you know they're the right ones? How can you make a clear pat­tern out of so many intangibles, including that greatest one, the very private I?

6. Well for one thing, it's fairly obvious that the more you read and see and hear, the more equipped you'll be to practice that art

of association which is at the basis of all understanding and judg­ment. The more you live and the more you look, the more aware you are of a consistent pattern—as universal as the stars, as the tides, as breathing, as night and day—underlying everything. I would call this pattern and this rhythm an order. Not order—an order. Within it exists an incredible diversity of forms. Without it lies chaos—the wild cells of destruction—sickness. It is in the end up to you to distinguish between the diversity that is health and the chaos that is sickness, and you can't do this without a process of association that can link a bar of Mozart with the comer of a Ver­meer painting, or a Stravinsky score with a Picasso abstraction; or that can relate an aggressive act with a Franz Kline painting and a fit of coughing with a John Cage composition.

There is no accident in the fact that certain expressions of art live for all time and that others die with the moment, and although you may not always define the reasons, you can ask the questions. What does an artist say that is timeless; how does he say it? How much is fashion, how much is merely reflection? Why is Sir Wal­ter Scott so hard to read now, and Jane Austen not? Why is baroque right for one age and too effulgent for another?

Can a standard of craftsmanship apply to art of all ages, or does each have its own, and different, definitions? You may have been aware, inadvertently, that craftsmanship has become a dirty word these years because, again, it implies standards—something done well or done badly. The result of this convenient avoidance is a plenitude of actors who can't project their voices, singers who can't phrase their songs, poets who can't communicate emotion, and writers who have no vocabulary—not to speak of painters who can't draw. The dogma now is that craftsmanship gets in the way of expression. You can do better if you don't know how you do it, let alone what you're doing.

1. think it is time you helped reverse this trend by trying to re­discover craft: The command of the chosen instrument, whether it is a brush, a word, or a voice. When you begin to detect the differ­ence between freedom and sloppiness, between serious experi­mentation and egotherapy, between skill and slickness, between strength and violence, you are on your way to separating the sheep from the goats, a form of segregation denied us for quite a

while. All you need to restore it is a small bundle of standards and a Geiger counter that detects fraud, and we might begin our tour of the arts in an area where both are urgently needed: Contempo­rary painting.

10. I don't know what's worse: To have to look at acres of bad art to find the little good, or to read what the critics say about it all. In no other field of expression has so much double-talk flourished, so much confusion prevailed, and so much nonsense been circulated: Further evidence of the close interdependence between the arts and the critical climate they inhabit. It will be my pleasure to share with you some of this double-talk so typical of our times.

11. Item one: Preface for a catalogue of an abstract painter:

12. "Time-bound meditation experiencing a life; sincere with plastic piety at the threshold of hallowed arcana; a striving for pure ideation giving shape to inner drive; formalized patterns where neural balances reach a fiction." End of quote. Know what this artist paints like now?

13. Item two: A review in the Art News:

14. "... a weird and disparate assortment of material, but the

monstrosity which bloomed into his most recent cancer of aggre­gations is present in some form everywhere...Then, later, "A gluttony of things and processes terminated by a glorious consti­pation."

is Item three, same magazine, review of an artist who welds au­

tomobile fragments into abstract shapes:

16. "Each fragment... is made an extreme of human exaspera­

tion, tom at and fought all the way, and has its rightness of form as if by accident. Any technique that requires order or discipline would just be the human ego. No, these must be egoless, uncontrolled, un­designed and different enough to give you a bang—fifty miles an hour around a telephone pole "

16. "Any technique that requires order or discipline would just be the human ego." What does he mean—"just be"? What are they really talking about? Is this journalism? Is it criticism? Or is it that other convenient abdication from standards of performance and judgment practiced by so many artists and critics that they, like certain writers who deal only in sickness and depravity, "reflect the chaos about them"? Again, whose chaos? Whose depravity?

I had always thought that the prime function of art was to cre­ate order out of chaos—again, not the order of neatness or rigidity or convention or artifice, but the order of clarity by which one will and one vision could draw the essential truth out of apparent con­fusion. I still do. It is not enough to use parts of a car to convey the brutality of the machine. This is as slavishly representative, and just as easy, as arranging dried flowers under glass to convey nature.

Speaking of which, i.e., the use of real materials (burlap, old gloves, bottletops) in lieu of pigment, this is what one critic had to say about an exhibition of Assemblage at the Museum of Modem Art last year:

Spotted throughout the show are indisputable works of art, ac­counting for a quarter or even a half of the total display. But the remainder are works of non-art, anti-art, and art substitutes that are the aesthetic counterparts of the social deficiencies that land people in the clink on charges of vagrancy. These aesthetic bank­rupts ... have no legitimate ideological roof over their heads and not the price of a square intellectual meal, much less a spiritual sandwich, in their pockets.

I quote these words of John Canaday of the New York Times as an example of the kind of criticism which puts responsibility to an intelligent public above popularity with an intellectual coterie. Canaday has the courage to say what he thinks and the capacity to say it clearly: Two qualities notably absent from his profession.

Next to art, I would say that appreciation and evaluation in the field of music is the most difficult. For it is rarely possible to judge a new composition at one hearing only. What seems con­fusing or fragmented at first might well become clear and organic a third time. Or it might not. The only salvation here for the lis­tener is, again, an instinct born of experience and association which allows him to separate intent from accident, design from experimentation, and pretense from conviction. Much of contem­porary music is, like its sister art, merely a reflection of the com­poser's own fragmentation: An absorption in self and symbols at the expense of communication with others. The artist, in short, says to the public: If you don't understand this, it's because you're dumb. I maintain that you are not. You may have to go part way or even halfway to meet the artist, but if you must go the whole way, it's his fault, not yours. Hold fast to that. And remember it too when you read new poetry, that estranged sister of music.

A multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.

To this tendency of life and manners, the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves.

This startlingly applicable comment was written in the year 1800 by William Wordsworth in the preface to his "Lyrical Bal­lads"; and it has been cited by Edwin Muir in his recently pub­lished book "The Estate of Poetry." Muir states that poetry's effec­tive range and influence have diminished alarmingly in the modern world. He believes in the inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind and the great and permanent objects that act upon it, and suggests that the audience will increase when "poetry loses what obscurity is left in it by attempting greater themes, for great themes have to be stated clearly." If you keep that firmly in mind and resist, in Muir's words, "the vast dissem­ination of secondary objects that isolate us from the natural world," you have gone a long way toward equipping yourself for the examination of any work of art.

When you come to theatre, in this extremely hasty tour of the arts, you can approach it on two different levels. You can bring to it anticipation and innocence, giving yourself up, as it were, to the life on the stage and reacting to it emotionally, if the play is good, or listlessly, if the play is boring; a part of the audience organism that expresses its favor by silence or laughter and its disfavor by coughing and rustling. Or you can bring to it certain critical facul­ties that may heighten, rather than diminish, your enjoyment.

You can ask yourselves whether the actors are truly in their parts or merely projecting themselves; whether the scenery helps or hurts the mood; whether the playwright is honest with himself,

his characters, and you. Somewhere along the line you can learn to distinguish between the true creative act and the false arbitrary gesture; between fresh observation and stale cliché; between the avant-garde play that is pretentious drivel and the avant-garde play that finds new ways to say old truths.

Purpose and craftsmanship—end and means—these are the 25 keys to your judgment in all the arts. What is this painter trying to say when he slashes a broad band of black across a white canvas and lets the edges dribble down? Is it a statement of violence? Is it a self-portrait? If it is one of these, has he made you believe it? Or is this a gesture of the ego or a form of therapy? If it shocks you, what does it shock you into?

And what of this tight little painting of bright flowers in a 26 vase? Is the painter saying anything new about flowers? Is it dif­ferent from a million other canvases of flowers? Has it any life, any meaning, beyond its statement? Is there any pleasure in its forms or texture? The question is not whether a thing is abstract or rep­resentational, whether it is "modem" or conventional. The ques­tion, inexorably, is whether it is good. And this is a decision which only you, on the basis of instinct, experience, and association, can make for yourself. It takes independence and courage. It involves, moreover, the risk of wrong decision and the humility, after the passage of time, of recognizing it as such. As we grow and change and learn, our attitudes can change too, and what we once thought obscure or "difficult" can later emerge as coherent and illuminat­ing. Entrenched prejudices, obdurate opinions are as sterile as no opinions at all.

Yet standards there are, timeless as the universe itself. And 27 when you have committed yourself to them, you have acquired a passport to that elusive but immutable realm of truth. Keep it with you in the forests of bewilderment. And never be afraid to speak up.

1962

Definition

Women's Beauty: Put Down or Power Source?

Susan Sontag

For the Greeks, beauty was a virtue: A kind of excellence. Persons then were assumed to be what we now have to call—lamely, envi­ously—whole persons. If it did occur to the Greeks to distinguish be­tween a person's "inside" and "outside," they still expected that in­ner beauty would be matched by beauty of the other kind. The well-born young Athenians who gathered around Socrates found it quite paradoxical that their hero was so intelligent, so brave, so hon­orable, so seductive—and so ugly. One of Socrates' main pedagog­ical acts was to be ugly—and teach those innocent, no doubt splen­did—looking disciples of his how full of paradoxes life really was.

They may have resisted Socrates' lesson. We do not. Several thousand years later, we are more wary of the enchantments of beauty. We not only split off—with the greatest facility—the "in­side" (character, intellect) from the "outside" (looks); but we are actually surprised when someone who is beautiful is also intelli­gent, talented, good.

It was principally the influence of Christianity that deprived beauty of the central place it had in classical ideals of human ex­cellence. By limiting excellence (virtus in Latin) to moral virtue only, Christianity set beauty adrift—as an alienated, arbitrary, su­perficial enchantment. And beauty has continued to lose prestige.

For close to two centuries it has become a convention to attribute beauty to only one of the two sexes: The sex which, however Fair, is always Second. Associating beauty with women has put beauty even further on the defensive, morally.

A beautiful woman, we say in English. But a handsome man. "Handsome" is the masculine equivalent of—and refusal of—a compliment which has accumulated certain demeaning overtones, by being reserved for women only. That one can call a man "beau­tiful" in French and in Italian suggests that Catholic countries—un­like those countries shaped by the Protestant version of Christian­ity—still retain some vestiges of the pagan admiration for beauty. But the difference, if one exists, is of degree only. In every modem country that is Christian or post-Christian, women are the beautiful sex—to the detriment of the notion of beauty as well as of women.

To be called beautiful is thought to name something essential to women's character and concerns. (In contrast to men—whose' essence is to be strong, or effective, or competent.) It does not take someone in the throes of advanced feminist awareness to perceive that the way women are taught to be involved with beauty en­courages narcissism, reinforces dependence and immaturity. Everybody (women and men) knows that. For it is "everybody," a whole society, that has identified being feminine with caring about how one looks. (In contrast to being masculine—which is identified with caring about what one is and does and only secon­darily, if at all, about how one looks.) Given these stereotypes, it is no wonder that beauty enjoys, at best, a rather mixed reputation.

It is not, of course, the desire to be beautiful that is wrong but the obligation to be—or to try. What is accepted by most women as a flattering idealization of their sex is a way of making women feel inferior to what they actually are—or normally grow to be. For the ideal of beauty is administered as a form of self-oppression. Women are taught to see their bodies in parts, and to evaluate each part sep­arately. Breasts, feet, hips, waistline, neck, eyes, nose, complexion, hair, and so on—each in turn is submitted to an anxious, fretful, of­ten despairing scrutiny. Even if some pass muster, some will always be found wanting. Nothing less than perfection will do.

In men, good looks is a whole, something taken in at a glance. It does not need to be confirmed by giving measurements of dif-

ferent regions of the body, nobody encourages a man to dissect his appearance, feature by feature. As for perfection, that is consid­ered trivial—almost unmanly. Indeed, in the ideally good-looking man a small imperfection or blemish is considered positively de­sirable. According to one movie critic (a woman) who is a declared Robert Redford fan, it is having that cluster of skin-colored moles on one cheek that saves Redford from being merely a "pretty face." Think of the depreciation of women—as well as of beauty— that is implied in that judgment.

"The privileges of beauty are immense," said Cocteau. To be s sure, beauty is a form of power. And deservedly so. What is lamen­table is that it is the only form of power that most women are en­couraged to seek. This power is always conceived in relation to men; it is not the power to do but the power to attract. It is a power that negates itself. For this power is not one that can be chosen freely—at least, not by women—or renounced without social censure.

To preen, for a woman, can never be just a pleasure. It is also 9 a duty. It is her work. If a woman does real work—and even if she has clambered up to a leading position in politics, law, medicine, business, or whatever—she is always under pressure to confess that she still works at being attractive. But in so far as she is keep­ing up as one of the Fair Sex, she brings under suspicion her very capacity to be objective, professional, authoritative, thoughtful. Damned if they do—women are. And damned if they don't.

One could hardly ask for more important evidence of the dan- 10 gers of considering persons as split between what is "inside" and what is "outside" than that interminable half-comic half-tragic tale, the oppression of women. How easy it is to start off by defin­ing women as caretakers of their surfaces, and then to disparage them (or find them adorable) for being "superficial." It is a crude trap, and it has worked for too long. But to get out of the trap re­quires that women get some critical distance from that excellence and privilege which is beauty, enough distance to see how much beauty itself has been abridged in order to prop up the mythology of the "feminine." There should be a way of saving beauty from women—and/or them.

1975