A fresco does not hang on a wall like a canvas. It is painted into wet lime and becomes part of the wall, so it shares whatever happens to the building: fire, damp, clumsy repairs, even a city councilman who wanted it washed off. The twelve frescoes here still carry those accidents, and many still show how the painter worked, one patch of plaster at a time.
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How These Were Chosen
A fresco is painted into lime plaster while it is still wet. The pigments need only water, and as the lime sets, it locks them into the wall. Plaster stays wet for about a day, so a large wall goes up in patches. Each one is a giornata, Italian for a day's work, and the seams often still show.
Paint added once the plaster has dried, called secco, sits on the surface and can flake away. True fresco lasts as long as its wall. The method goes back to antiquity, and Italian painters perfected it from the 1200s on.
Every fresco on this list keeps a visible trace of how it was made, or of what its wall has been through since. Each room or chapel gets a single entry.
12. Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Birth of the Virgin (1486 to 1490)
In a fresco on the left wall of a Florentine chapel, a young woman in an orange brocade dress walks into a paneled bedroom at the head of a small group of visitors. In the bed, Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, props herself up to greet them, while midwives pour water from a pewter jug into a basin to bathe the newborn.
The visitor in brocade is no saint. She is Ludovica Tornabuoni, daughter of Giovanni Tornabuoni, the banker who paid for the chapel. She walks through the Birth of the Virgin, painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio between 1486 and 1490 on the lowest tier of the Tornabuoni Chapel, in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.
The banker left the painter very little room. His contract with Ghirlandaio, signed on September 1, 1485, named every scene and every saint, the painted architecture framing them, the pigments and the gold. It even set the method: fresco, done in the traditional way. The work was to run from May 1486 to May 1490.
Inside those terms, Ghirlandaio still found a margin for himself. On the paneling behind Anne's bed, he used some of the patron's gold to letter his own names: Bighordi, his family name, and Grillandai, his nickname.
The job itself was enormous. With a workshop that included his brothers Davide and Benedetto, he covered some 550 square meters of wall, about 5,900 square feet, and the chapel was unveiled on December 22, 1490, seven months behind schedule.
The scene he left there moves a sacred birth into a rich Florentine home. The brocade, the paneling and the pewter jug all come from the patron's own world, and his daughter steps into the room as a guest.
At a Glance
Artist: Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448 to 1494)
Painted: 1486 to 1490
Medium: Fresco
Size: About 740 × 450 cm (291 × 177 in)
Where to see it: Tornabuoni Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence
11. Andrea Pozzo, The Glory of Saint Ignatius (1691 to 1694)
Above the nave of Sant'Ignazio in Rome, painted columns and arches carry the walls far higher than the stone goes, then open onto a sky crowded with saints and angels. From one spot on the floor, every column stands perfectly straight. A few steps away, the whole structure starts to lean.