A number of these frescos were painted over with lime wash, a type of plaster that was applied to walls as a whitewash and had the effect of discoloring the frescos. The lime wash was meant to protect the frescos from moisture damage but it also served as a kind of marker for which frescoes were important enough to preserve.

The Byzantine Frescos blog is about the efforts of a group of scientists who are working on removing the lime wash from these frescos so that they can be restored. There has been a lot of controversy surrounding this project because some archaeologists and art historians believe that restoration should be avoided when possible so as not to alter an ancient artifact.

There are many Byzantine frescos in the world, but not many can be saved.

And those that can be saved, probably need to be.

It’s important to understand what makes a fresco different from a painting on canvas or paper, or even a mosaic. The fresco is made of plaster, which is a porous material. So when you paint it, you paint the plaster directly, rather than gluing down pieces of paper or canvas to the surface.

A canvas painting has three dimensions; feel free to touch it and you’ll discover it’s got thickness. A painted mosaic also has three dimensions; likewise a painted piece of furniture or wall decoration. But a fresco has only two dimensions; it is flat and painted onto the surface of another flat thing (a wall). So when you touch it, your fingers go straight through to the other side.

Recently, I stumbled across an article about a Byzantine fresco of the Resurrection that was painted on top of another fresco of a different subject. This is one of the many issues that arise when undertaking the restoration of murals. Let me show you what I mean through the story of one other mural in the same church. The “Life of Christ” mural is similarly situated above another ancient work, but this time it is a fresco depicting the martyrdom of St. Euphemia. There are many different ways to approach such a problem and restorers have to consider several factors before making their decision.

The first consideration is the importance and interest of each scene to those viewing it today. In this case, both scenes depict religious events and so should be equally interesting to viewers. However, there is more action shown in one piece, giving it much more visual impact than its counterpart (the Crucifixion scene). The second factor to consider is whether or not either image can be preserved without being destroyed by attempting restoration work on top of it. In this case, we know that both scenes date from the mid-14th century and we also know that neither image was originally created on top of another image, or at least not directly on top of it (it

The frescos were last restored in the 1950s, when a scholar named Dimitrios Poulopoulos was assigned to analyze them and suggest ways for their preservation. As he noted, “the most important work carried out in this period was the consolidation of the frescos and their binding with new materials at the same time as a series of studies were made regarding their historical significance.”

In other words, no one knew what they were looking at. They didn’t know what pigments had been used or how those pigments had changed over time. They didn’t know whether the bright colors seen today were really what the artists had intended. Even if they could have answered these questions, they couldn’t have known how to put things right.

That’s the reason for their survival, but it’s also a problem for art historians. The more time goes by, the more the frescos are changed by weather and human intervention. One of the most important archaeological sites in Greece, the church of Panagia Ekatontapiliani on the Greek island of Chios, was heavily restored as recently as 1960. It’s more accurate to think of these frescos as particles in motion than as finished works of art.

But that’s not to say there isn’t a lot to see at Hagia Sophia. Almost every square inch is covered with imagery. I remember seeing a photograph of it once and thinking that there could never be that much stuff in one place anywhere else. I was wrong; there’s even more in this church, which is probably why they call it “museum.”

The particular style of Byzantine art is deliberately spare: images are outlined in black and filled with bright colors, particularly brilliant reds and blues. There’s some gold too, but not much; at least not yet: over time, gold leaf has rubbed off and turned green because of air pollution, making some images look like tattered flags left out overnight in a rainstorm.

This is the point where I would normally

Frescoes are painted on wet or dry plaster. Although there is no single accepted definition of the term, fresco painting is a technique in which the paint, containing either pigment mixed with water or pigments mixed with a water-soluble binder, has to be applied to the plaster before it dries. The word comes from the Italian language, meaning “fresh”, and describes both the technique used and the finished painting.

After a number of centuries well-preserved frescos can become detached from the wall and can be lifted without damaging them, as long as their basic support structure remains intact. Frescoes are different from murals, which are painted on walls that have been plastered over and not yet dried. Frescoes are temporary images, painted quickly with light colors that will blend into the plaster as it dries and darken over time. The colors lighten as they dry to create tonal variations within each fresco.

Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin (c. 1516–1518) in the Frari Church in Venice also uses this technique for its impressive effects. Typically frescos need to be restored because cracks begin to show on the surface; colors lose their original vibrancy; and figures can

The Byzantine empire, which lasted from 330 to 1453, has been called the “last empire.” It was certainly last in the sense that it fell hardest and fastest: assaulted by the Turks, battered by Christian schism, unable to keep up with the new power of Western Europe.

The question of why it fell is at once a matter of religious history, cultural history, and plain old political history. The Byzantines, who thought of themselves as Roman and even Hellenistic, weren’t ready for the Renaissance, which began in Italy before spreading north into Germany and France. The Renaissance remains hard for us to understand; it’s hard for us to feel sympathy for a culture that could not embrace human rights or democracy or even rational science. But what’s most striking about Byzantium is not how different from ours it was but how much it resembles our own late-capitalist society.

For almost its entire run Byzantium was ruled by an imperial elite of wealthy families who had the sole right to govern and their own private armies. Indeed there were several periods when only two families controlled things: the Heraclians and the Macedonians (6th–7th centuries), then three families—the Phocas, Heraclius, and Tz