Fresco is a typical Italian painting technique which continues to be used to perfection by several practitioners. For example, there’s Julia Mee whose family has spent many years here. Her web site at https://www.juliamee.co.uk/ will explain more about this fascinating art which is now in full creativity in Scotland at Marchmont House:
‘Fresco’ means ‘fresh’ (since the paint is applied to still wet plaster) and also has connotations of open-air as in ‘al fresco’ for many frescoes are, indeed, painted on outside walls. Highlights of any visits to Italy include looking at some of the magnificent cycle of frescoes this country holds: for example, the Sistine chapel (Michelangelo), Brancacci chapel (Masaccio), the Vatican palace (Raphael), and the Arena chapel (Giotto). What is often not noticed is the fact that frescoes can also decorate palaces, villas and even the most unassuming mansions? We don’t have to go far to discover them here in Bagni di Lucca. Last week we visited a nearby house with a somewhat forbidding inelegant exterior. Stepping inside upon invitation we discovered a multitude of rooms a few of which (on the ‘piano noble’ of the first floor) had some elaborate frescoes as decorative features.
In one room I was enchanted by this series of fine tropical birds.
When were these frescoes painted and by whom? Their style suggests the turn of the nineteenth century and particularly the ‘Empire style’ introduced by Princess Elisa, Napoleon’s sister, who ruled Lucca. These frescoes were the ‘wall paper’ of the times. They were used to update a formerly undistinguished, even primitive, building into something more aristocratic and sophisticated especially appropriate if the owners had gone up in the world and were aiming for a more stylish way of life. Clearly these rooms could be used as ball-rooms and when there were marriageable daughters in the family show them off in a more enticing way and gain a greater variety of suitors.
But who painted them? Has any significant research been made into these high-end painters and decorators?
In another building, Borgo a Mozzano’s library where I have taught, there are further examples of fine decorative frescoed rooms described in my post at:
https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2016/01/24/a-lovely-library-ceiling-at-borgo-a-mozzano/
Sadly there are several instances where beautiful frescoes are allowed to go to rack and run. Nowhere is this more apparent than the abandoned village of Bugnano just up the road from us.
I describe this desolation further in my post at:
https://longoio.wordpress.com/2014/03/16/abandon-all-hope-all-ye-who-enter-here/
I just wonder how many more frescoed rooms are tucked away in buildings which appear to have nothing special about them. The frescoes are clearly not of the highest art but their exquisite decorative value should not be overlooked especially as they are so typical of a tradition which England’s damp and dreary climate has been largely unable to support.