Project PRIM’ART_Portugal Rediscovering Mural ART: Historical and Scientific Study of Evora Archiepiscopal (1516-1615)
Mural paintings were one of the most recurrent arts in the Southern Portugal and it has reached its maximum splendor in the 16th and 17th centuries. However, little is still known about the operant modus of its performers. Knowledge of the raw materials and paintings techniques used to execute wall paintings is essential in the fields of history of art and for proper conservation projects. Taking these aspects under consideration, the two main goals of projet PRIM’ART created in 2013 were:
to assess the pictorial praxis in the town of Évora and its ouskirst in the 16th and 17 th c. and to assess the extent to which the painters were influenced by the Évora’s cultural environment, performing compositions of classic and humanist nature or, in other cases, breaking up with external novelties;
to obtain data about the raw materials and pictorial techniques used to execute the mural paintings. Particularly interesting was to assess to which extent painters followed the practice of buon fresco emphasized by Art theorists, like the Portuguese Francisco de Holanda after his contact with Michelangelo in Rome (1541) or did they seized and reinterpreted these guidelines in light of their personal experience and taste
Secondary goals
To identify contact points between mural and easel paintings at the level of formal elements and building compositions, the use of materials and colour palette setting, in order to clarify authorship. To this end, the projet has combined a documentary and bibliographic data of the results of a wide range of techniques for surface analysis and materials characterization;
-to compare the historical, technical and material documentation produced with comparable data from studies on mural paintings from the same chronological period in Portugal and other European countries ( especially Italy).