Ademas de este conjunto, otros 4 fragmentos --con mortero de preparacion de grosor conservado entre 1,2/1,3 y 0,9 cm y fino
intonaco de menos de 1 mm de grosor--muestran rasgos aparentes de letras pintadas; sus reducidas dimensiones y deficiente conservacion--por lo que no se reproducen--excluyen cualquier posibilidad de identificar caracteres o de intuir su ubicacion, aunque parecen pertenecer al mismo titulus.
Fresco is different from other painting techniques, in that as soon as the wall gets coated with the intonaco, it starts to dry, giving the artist an eight-to-10-hour window of time to work.
Because the intonaco must be painted while it is wet, the wall is coated with just the amount of fresh intonaco that an artist is able to paint in one day; thus, the art of fresco is necessarily piecemeal.
THE MATERIALS Intonaco is the basic material for fresco.
Masaccio may have outlined the composition on the arriccio (the rough lower coat of plaster), but the episode was not finished on the
intonaco (the smooth, final coat of plaster) until several decades later by Filippino, who apparently added some portraits of contemporaries.
These underdrawings were then covered over in the process of laying down the final, fine plaster layer, the
intonaco. Beginning about 1430, however, a few central Italian artists (Uccello, Castagno, and Domenico Veneziano) started using pricked cartoons as a means of transferring previously drawn, accurately foreshortened, and/or animated figures directly onto the
intonaco.
The rich texture of Guidoriccio's costume and the gualdrappa of his steed depends upon a sophisticated, and highly unusual, punching technique: a large square tool, comprising sixteen pyramidal 'teeth', was repeatedly applied to the wet intonaco (Fig.
Present in the costumes of Guidoriccio and his steed are complex motifs moulded into the intonaco, a procedure found only in the works of Lippo and Simone; (33) and the metallic trappings of the horse were originally made of tin, glazed with a colored varnish, a technique, once again, associated almost exclusively with 'i Memmi'.
Small in scale but occupying a prime corner site in the middle of Alberti territory, the sobriety of the facade (intonaco with stone window surrounds and corner bugnati instead of the showy stone rustication made popular by the Medici) signals, as Preyer suggests, a desire to avoid the hostility of neighbors.
Dismissing attributional controversies (there is too little known of palaces in the late Quattrocento and early Cinquecento to make a convincing argument), Preyer believes that the Corsi-Horne may be the first example of a type (the intonaco facade with corner quoins) that had a long and fruitful progeny -- although she herself agrees that its originality and influence seems inversely proportional to its and its patron's importance in Florence.
(32) Two years later, in July and November of 1592, arriccio,
intonaco, and whitewash were applied to the buildings and loggia of the piazza, half of the structures over the cloister loggias were re-roofed, and the stairs were repaved.
Sebastiano's use of a purplish-grey tint in the
intonaco of his Farnesina frescoes is rightly highlighted.
