Welcome to the murals of Belfast!

If the walls of cities could talk, they would tell us many stories... This is what happens in Belfast, where thousands of tourists come to see the murals scattered around the city to learn about the history and culture of Belfast and Northern Ireland. The aim of this web page is to be a geographical guide to the Belfast murals. It is a work in progress, we hope to add more murals, improve some images and add some information about the murals .... when we can find the time to do so!

FRÉSCA

Fresco is a word used to describe a painting on wet plaster. To create it, the artist covers the wall with levkas – a mixture of chalk, animal glue (from bones, swimming bladders or cottage cheese) and linseed oil – and applies natural pigments to the damp plaster. The artist then has only seven or nine hours to work until the lime hardens. He no longer has the right to make a mistake: to correct even the slightest flaw, he has to remove the entire layer of plaster. When the picture dries, it is covered with a calcium film to the pigment does not crumble.

Fresco takes its name from the Italian word fresco, “fresh, damp, undried”. It was first used by the Italian artist Cennino Cennini in his treatise “The Book of Art” in 1437. Nowadays, all wall paintings are referred to by this word, and the ancient technique of fresco is referred to as buon fresco, meaning “true”.

One of the earliest examples of frescoes is a wall painting in the palace of the Sumerian king Zimri-Lim in Mari (modern Syria), which is about 3700 years old. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans decorated temples and houses of nobility with frescoes. For example, archaeologists found such murals during excavations in the 1800s in Pompeii.

In Byzantium, frescoes decorated the walls of temples. It was from there they spread across Europe and into Kievan Rus. Russian craftsmen often worked in a mixed technique: first they painted on wet plaster, and then redrawn the details with tempera paint. An egg, animal or vegetable glue were added to the colour to help the paint adhere better to the surface. That is why, for example, to this day there remains an image of the Saviour Almighty in the dome of the Church of the Transfiguration on Il’ina Street in Novgorod. This image was painted by the famous master Theophanes the Greek in 1378.

The flowering of the fresco occurred during the Renaissance. Italian masters often experimented with the technique and invented the mezzo fresco technique. The painter wetted the dry surface of the area and painted it. This was more convenient, and the image was just as strong, which is why this technique became the most popular in the 16th century. The mezzo frescoes in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican are an example of this technique. In 1481-1512 artists Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Pietro Perugino, Cosimo Rosselli and Michelangelo Buonarroti decorated it with frescoes on Biblical themes.

Since the early 19th century, painting on wet plaster has lost popularity, and modern artists hardly ever use the technique.