Italian wall painting in oil: Carlo Bononi and Ferraù Fenzoni, two artists of the seventeenth century

Abstract

There are many early documentary sources dealing with the technique of wall painting in oil but it is described in a more detailed way in treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The contemporary taste for painting with a high density of colour and depth of tone was better expressed by the use of oil medium rather than by the traditional light fresco technique, which did not allow the use of many pigments and the superimposition of several coloured layers. Rather few wall paintings in oil have survived, and those on the exterior have generally deteriorated badly. For this reason their study from a technical point of view is difficult and little information is available. Analytical studies carried out on wall paintings by two artists of the seventeenth century, Carlo Bononi and Ferraù Fenzoni, have shown that they painted on walls using the same technique, pigments and medium as they used in their easel paintings on canvas.