A painting technique is the way a painter prepares a surface and puts paint on it: what the pigment is mixed with, what it goes onto, how many layers it gets and how fast the work has to be done. The material ones are fresco, tempera, oil and watercolor, and the handling ones include impasto, glazing and pointillism. The painting where the choice shows most plainly is Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, painted in Milan between 1495 and 1498, because the paint he tried there began to flake almost at once.
Every technique is a way of managing time. Paint that dries in minutes forces quick decisions, and paint that stays wet for days leaves room to change one's mind. Wall painters, panel painters and watercolorists each worked inside the limits their paint set.
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The Last Supper is often called a fresco, and it is not. A true fresco is painted into wet plaster, one patch at a time, and Leonardo wanted more time than that allows. For the Duke of Milan's commission he painted in tempera and oil on a dry wall, so that he could go back over a face or a fold for as long as he liked.
It did not hold. Soon after the work was finished in 1498, the paint began to flake and fall. Steam from the convent kitchen and soot from candles hastened the damage, and about sixty years later Giorgio Vasari described the picture as a muddle of blots.
Leonardo had wanted more time than a wall gives, and the wall won. In Florence, on a second wall, he tried again, this time with heat.
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