William Blake's “Portable Fresco”

Abstract

Writing in his Descriptive Catalogue of 1809, William Blake declares that he had invented “a portable fresco,” and “fresco” is a term he uses a number of times in the Catalogue and elsewhere. Blake's was a personal medium, involving tempera, gum, and glue on a ground of plaster whiting. The support could be canvas, wood, metal, or even paper (Blake considered the color-printed drawings he produced starting in 1795 as frescoes). This of course is not how the frescoes of Raphael and Michelangelo were made, and Blake had ample opportunity to learn from authors like William Aglionby and Cennino Cennini that they painted in water-soluble colors on wet plaster. Why, then, did he use the term for a different kind of painting? The answer lies partly in his desire to emulate the Italian Renaissance painters that he so much admired, by using what he considered to be an equivalent of their medium. The “portable” aspect would enable the painting to be moved from one site to another, an experiment to be repeated by the great muralist Diego Rivera at the Museum of Modern Art in 1931. Also salient is the matter of size. Blake's pictures with a very few exceptions were relatively small, but he aspired to paint “Pictures on a scale that is suitable to the grandeur of the nation,” and he mentioned a height of “one hundred feet.” Circumstances permitting, Blake would have worked on such a scale, but as they did not, his works could be thought of as models in portable fresco.