Tutors: Professor Alberto Felici  and Proforessa Daniela Murphy

Course aim

This short  fresco course is a two and a half day course, particularly suitable for high school or university students. The program is directed at an audience that has not necessarily studied art history or general painting techniques in depth.
The objective is to give a clear idea of what a fresco represented in it’s own time and how it was made, along with an insight of Italian culture.
Students work, in a quiet small village or town alongside Italians and by working, cease to be simply spectators but in some way start to be come part of the place.

Learning points

After an initial period of visiting museums and monuments this course gives students imput that allows them to reflect on what they have already seen and to see more in works of art that they will go on to see.

The practical nature of the course allows them to experience the simplicity of the technique, and acquire manuality,  whilst leading to an understanding of the great technical skill of many Rennaissence artists. The students will leave us with enough knowledge and reference material to be able to use the fresco technique for their own contemporary applications.

The fresco relies on a chemical process for its immortality, and this process is explained to the students.

Students will be looking at the fresco from a historical point of view, and made to understand what life was really like during the Rennaissence, without the commodities of modern life.

Working closely with Italians there will inevitably be a cultural exchange.

Course outline

An introductory slide demonstration is shown, illustrating the purely technical aspects of fresco painting. Alongside this,  we explain how the technique was relevant to its period: it was a very effective method of communication, in a time when most of the population was illiterate  and the church was the focal point of social life.

A book of notes with a historical background to the artist studied, and glossary of technical terms, is given to the students to take away.

The second part of the course is the practical part. This involves the students copying a particular from a series of frescos by one artist,  following the exact same process that the artists used centuries ago, as described by Cennino Cennini in “The Book of Art”. We recreate a “bottega” the genuine atmosphere of an artists workshop.

We provide all materials,  safety equipment  and a wide selection of reference material from which students will be free to select an image that interests them. The subjects range in difficulty: from simple decorative elements to figures that require greater skill to complete. Artists centuries ago,  would have encountered and affronted a whole series of problems that surrounded the actual painting of a piece, resolving all of them with skill and ingenuity and here the students’ attention is focused on overcoming the same problems with the same tools  and their own ingenuity.   

The final section of the course is a guided visit to see a fresco undergoing restoration in Florence. Here the students will meet the very painting that they will have copied. Restoration sites are not open to the general public, so your students will be privileged to climb the scaffolding to meet the fresco face to face.

Viewing a fresco painting close to hand,  can be experienced as a journey backwards in time,   an opportunity to make direct contact with the person who created the painting  many centuries ago. It is often possible to recognize problems an artist came up against and see re-thinking that took place during the actual process of painting. Perhaps, no other painting technique offers such a rich collection of explicit  information about its creation, exclusively through simple close observation.

 Fresco courses for two schools

This is an event involving an Italian and a guest (English speaking) school.

A design for a contemporary fresco from each school is selected and,  re-creating the atmosphere of a Renaissance workshop  with a master artist  and his apprentices, the students work side by side to realize the paintings.

For further information about these or other courses for schools, availability and cost please contact us: info@dedaloarte.org