You know Michelangelo had mad skills, but did you know how dangerous the painting technique he used was? Did you know he had to mix corrosive chemicals together and work against the clock? He even used volcanic ash from the ancient, buried city of Pompeii. Learn with us about the science behind fresco painting!
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Alexander Karl Witt
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radical dude
amazing science
With the paint drippings falling into Michelangelo and his apprentice's eyes while laying on their backs to 'cement, wet plaster, lay templates of the drawings and then paint these ceilings would have taken it's toll on the strongest of Michelangelo and his students besides slowly blinding them and crippling them from the laying on the "bridging" or scaffolding that held them to the very top of the ceiling for Hours a Day!!! … as just seeing in the -Michelangelo & The Science of Fresco Painting | Chemistry Meets Art video we just watched.. the Volcanic ash or 'Porcelaina' used in the making of the bonding agent for the fresco would, and also from a personal note, this cement would dry the oils from a persons skin until the cracking and bleeding of the skin would become unbearable…… this I know from my personal involvement in the constructing of the building of the bridgework from 287 over the saw mill as well as the building of the Westchester Airport while in the carpenters union…. This work is tedious and backbreaking… "but this we do in the name of Art.and construction which in my opinion is an extension of Art. Dino
I had no idea frescoes were so complex! I am doing a research project on murals and the website I was using simply said "Mixed with water and pigment on a wet plaster, the paint interacts with air, causing a chemical reaction which fixes the pigment particles in the plaster." I was curious about what exactly this reaction was. Thanks for the detailed video!
You just got a new subscriber! Thanks for all your videos!
Superb video…… I loved it…. Thank u so much
Anyone else need to watch this for school?
Awesome content…new subscriber here 😉
Although quicklime was slaked, the dangerous job of producing lime putty is left to others (besides the artist) to mix and age. Artists want well aged lime putty. They only use fresh lime putty if given no other choice. Even so, lime putty is also caustic. More dangerous to the artist are the use of various pigments some of which are toxic. I doubt Michelangelo wore glasses and the “paint” used in fresco is watery and easily dripped. Painting in contorted positions to avoid getting paint in your eyes and to properly see what you are doing takes a toll on the body. The long hours of painting also add up. Buon Fresco is a wonderful medium and one which is thankfully still in use today.
Had to watch this for my art history class, its pretty cool!
VERY INTERESTING!!!! GOOD VIDEO!???
Graham Norton's son?
Michelangelo is not a painter he is a sculptor
Awesome, isn't it/?
Thanks for the recipe
I am a headmaster in school i am showing it in smart board
I really enjoy your programs. Forgive me a little pedantry: the woman's head at 1:56 is encaustic, not fresco. Also, intonaco is pronounced in-TON-ak-oh (some Italian words have their emphasis on the third-to-the-last syllable). While I'm at it, Michelangelo was born in Cap-REY-sey, not Cap-Rees (as you pronounced it in your excellent and entertaining biography of the maestro).
Michelangelo complained about working in fresco in one of his most famous poems, which includes a drawling of him standing up painting the Sistine ceiling. He designed a special scaffolding to paint the ceiling because it would have been too complex and required too much material to do it from floor to ceiling. Finally, he was an expert in fresco painting. He was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio when he was a boy in Florence, and learned the techniques from a true master. He knew exactly what he was doing as a fresco painter, from the drawings, to creating large scale cartoons, to transferring the images, to mixing the colors, etc. He was a master in ALL the arts – painting (fresco and tempera, drawing (black and red chalk, as well as pen and ink), architecture, engineering, POETRY, and, above all, sculpture. It is wrong to say he did not know how to paint frescoes. He did, and was very, very good at it, working in the true buon fresco technique. Leonardo da Vinci is the one who experimented with frescos, mixing oils, buon fresco and secco, often with disastrous results. I have my Ph.D. in art history, and have taught it for many years.
M. was a better sculpter. The S chapel was not that good, really.
Serious problem at 2:05.
You refer to the 13th century, and show a work from the early 16th century (that means the early 1500s).
The 13th century was the 1200s, right?
There ARE frescoes dating from the 1200s, but they are not very common, and are often badly deteriorated, or have been painted over. In the early 1300s, a famous Italian Master, Giotto, worked in Padua and Florence. He had many students and followers, and many frescoes exist from the 1300s.
In the 1400s, there were two really important fresco painters from Florence. One of them was Benozzo Gozzoli, and the other one was Domenico Ghirlandaio. Of these two painters, Benozzo Gozzoli is much the more popular because he painted the charming fresco of the Three Kings with the famous image of the young King on a white horse. Look it up.
Domenico Ghirlandaio is nowhere near as generally popular, but he was a superb craftsman, and his works were exactly what his patrons wanted- they showed the wealthy people of the city taking part, or being witness to religious scenes, like the Birth of John the Baptist, where all the daughters of rich bankers are coming to call on the new mother.
Part of Ghirlandaio's importance was that he TAUGHT Michelangelo. This means that although Michelangelo was primarily a sculptor, in his teen years he had been meticulously trained in the art of fresco by the most competent master of the 1400s. He COULD paint in fresco, and when the Pope told him to paint the ceiling, the Pope already knew about his background.
The sentence "Once painters like Raphael and Michelangelo got hold of the style, it was the "go-to" technique."
This is a REALLY SILLY sentence.
1. It is mildly annoying to have you put Raphael ahead of Michelangelo in a list of two. Michelangelo was the older painter, and his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel were FAR MORE influential than Raphael's. Raphael was directly influenced by what Michelangelo was doing. Michelangelo was not the tiniest bit influenced by ANYTHING that Raphael chose to do. He locked him out, and tried to pretend that he and his team were not painting the rooms 50 metres away.
2. This was not something that they "got hold of". This was something that they were both trained to do since they were children. Both had been trained in great big busy workshops with lots of commissions.
3. Painting fresco did not become more important "the go-to technique" because of the work of these two men. Frescoes had been used in both churches and palaces for centuries. The difference that the Sistine Chapel Ceiling made was that in the following 200 years, a number of churches received elaborately painted ceilings. But the technique of oil painting become widespread in the 1500s, and it was much easier to paint large canvases and set them into frames on the ceiling, than to paint elaborate frescoes.
4. Along with criticising fuzzy terms like "got hold of" and "go-to", I want to mention the misuse of the word "style".
This is VERY IMPORTANT for anyone who writes or talks about art to use correctly.
What is a "style"? A style has nothing to do with the technique (although the technique might affect the style). The two words are not interchangeable.
Fresco is a METHOD used for painting. The technique for painting fresco might differ from artist to artist, depending on how they lay the plaster, apply the drawing and paint the colour.
The "style" is the way the painting LOOKS. Michelangelo's STYLE was nothing like Raphael's style. You would never mistake a Raphael fresco, or even a Raphael figure in a fresco for one of Michelangelo's. Not even when Raphael was deliberately trying to COPY the style of a Michelangelo figure, which he did, probably deliberately to annoy Michelangelo.
Their styles were entirely different.
Michelangelo's STYLE, specifically, made a huge difference to the history of painting. Not to fresco painting specifically, but to all types of figure painting, mostly in oil paint which was of growing importance.
He didn’t lay on his back. He stood upright with his head tilted back. He had terrible neck problems as a result. He wrote a letter describing his process along with a drawing of himself painting.
Hi! Have you looked at Herculaneum? It was preserved much more than Pompeii. In Herculaneum the furniture was still there…a touch charred but still there. The roofs are still there…and the various levels!
Anyway, Pompeii has nothing on Herculaneum.
Just a thought…what do you think Michelangelo would do if he had access to what we have access to in the present?
Hhmmmmm?
God Bless!
I was waiting for video of Michelangelo making tomb of Pope!! ?? I did not find it anywhere