During my second year at the Center, I advanced my current book project on the theory and practice of mural painting with oil. This experimental technique captivated the pictorial intelligence and challenged the technical ingenuity of some of the most renowned artists of the Renaissance, from Leonardo da Vinci to Caravaggio. 

As the first book-length study dedicated to this elusive painting technique, my project disputes one of the most persistent and misleading ideas inherited from Renaissance art theory: the assumption that most (if not all) murals of the period were painted in fresco—that is, pigments mixed with water applied on freshly laid plaster. This idea is so entrenched that still today, by way of metonymy, the word “fresco” is used to refer to any mural. However, for centuries, the fresco was only one of the possible methods available to painters engaged in mural decoration, which provided much more room for experimentation than art-historical scholarship has acknowledged so far.

Recent restoration campaigns have highlighted such technical and material heterogeneity: from Raphael’s Vatican Rooms to Guido Reni’s Aurora in the Casino of the Palazzo Pallavicini Rospigliosi, the strikingly rich mixture of fresco and secco techniques, along with the unexpected use of certain materials for pigments, binders, and wall-priming, have rendered the established narratives of Renaissance mural painting obsolete, requiring its urgent rewriting in light of such exciting new evidence.

My project moves a decisive step forward in this direction. Drawing on new archival findings, a comprehensive analysis of early modern art literature, and insights from recent restoration projects, my work explores the main alternative to fresco within the typology of wall painting—oil. Freeing artists from the procedural and stylistic constraints intrinsic to fresco, oil paint allowed artists to achieve deeper nuances and richer visual effects, thus enabling the transfer of the formal and expressive explorations possible in easel painting onto the wall. However, the trade-off was a higher degree of perishability: When applied to walls, oil paint proved to be particularly unstable and more subject to the ravages of damp walls and moist air. This negotiation between artistic freedom and the quest for longevity is a central focus of my project, along with an investigation of the artist’s creative agency in relation to oil paint’s material agency. In sum, I investigate a reciprocal dynamic between the body and skill of the artist and the affordances of oil. This critical framework allows me to cast light on processes such as decision-making, risk-assessing, problem-solving, and trial-and-error learning that painters undertook when grappling with the challenges of using oils on wall surfaces. 

Throughout the year, I have been working on two case studies that will be the main subjects of two forthcoming articles. The first article focuses on the role this technique played as an agonal arena amid Rome’s competitive artistic scene in the 1510s and 1520s, with an emphasis on Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo as well as Giulio Romano and Perino del Vaga, who continued experimenting with the oil medium even after leaving Rome in the wake of the 1527 Sack. The second article centers on Reni’s lost mural in the cloister of San Michele in Bosco, Bologna, where he worked along with a team coordinated by Ludovico Carracci. Executed in oils, the cycle is now almost completely vanished, as it turned out to be particularly vulnerable to the humidity of the Bolognese hills. Archival records attest that Guido Reni’s mural, though celebrated for its “truthful and vivacious” style (as in Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s words), decayed rapidly, so much so that the painter had to repaint it after nearly 30 years. The rich archival documentation that has survived offers us a closer glimpse into Reni’s technical thinking and risk-taking attitude, while the stark contrast between the wealth of written sources and the loss of the mural prompts deeper reflection on both the limitations and possibilities of visual and archival records as heuristic tools. 

Finally, in March I was invited to give a lecture at Harvard University on “Caravaggio and the Tactility of Chiaroscuro” as part of the Caravaggio seminars organized by Shawon Kinew. The talk explored the pivotal role that Caravaggio played in redefining the pictorial modes and symbolic participation of chiaroscuro effects in the arts of the baroque. The topic is related to a broader research project on the notion of chiaroscuro between literary sources and artistic practice, which I undertook in my PhD dissertation and am currently developing into a book manuscript.

Beinecke Postdoctoral Fellow, 2023–2025

Maria Gabriella Matarazzo has been awarded a Humboldt Fellowship at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich.