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Lucretia Moroni

Dublin mural

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dublin mural
dublin mural
dublin mural
dublin mural
dublin mural
dublin mural
dublin mural
dublin mural

This mural was painted in the garden of a private residence in the south of central Dublin, close to Fitzwilliam Square. The Square, built in the late eighteenth century, was the smallest and the last of the five Georgian Squares to be built in Dublin.

The mural needed to be viewed from three levels and from two sides — from the back of the house and from the garden itself. I conceptualized this mural as a bird’s eye view, with the horizon seen from the second level, through the windows of the client’s study, and with the entire mural measuring twenty-one feet long and thirteen feet high. The subject was Ireland itself, from the center of Dublin to the outskirts of the city surrounded by green fields. We made a list of both historical and contemporary buildings and areas to be painted, including Trinity College, Dublin Castle, bridges over the River Liffey, and other Georgian squares and townhouses.

The sky was inspired by M. C. Escher’s famous woodcut “Day and Night,” in which ducks are flying in both directions, as ducks are frequent visitors to the garden’s pond. The Boston Ivy mimics the ivy growing around several buildings in the square, and the soft color palette was chosen to create more depth and distance between the mural and the exterior walls of the patio.

The mural was made with Keim mineral paint. In contrast to acrylic or exterior paint, which contains plastic and does not penetrate into the wall, mineral paint breathes naturally on masonry, uses true mineral colors, and does not fade, blister, or peel. This paint is the closest available today to the original fresco technique.

Biography

Born in Milan in 1960, Lucretia Moroni has worked as an artist, photographer, and designer in a wide variety of media for over forty years. In the early 1980s, Moroni studied decorative painting with a specialization in fresco painting, murals, and pattern design at the renowned Van der Kelen School in Brussels, and continued her training in interiors with the Oscar-nominated designer and architect Renzo Mongiardino in Milan and New York. 

Since the late 1980s, Moroni has worked on a vast range of private and public projects worldwide, including residences in Italy, South America, and the United States. Notable commissions include her work with Franco Zeffirelli for the sets of La Traviata, and her twenty-four custom-color trompe l’oeil murals in the Bethesda Fountain Arcade in New York’s Central Park. Her work has been featured prominently in design and general magazines and publications worldwide, including The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue Italia, and Architectural Digest. In her studio, Fatto a Mano, Moroni revives and adapts traditional and natural materials and techniques — including linen, silk, velvet, gauze, silk-screening, hand-printing, stenciling, and faux-finishing — to achieve a level of unparalleled artistry and contemporary craftsmanship in all aspects of her work.

Throughout her career, Moroni has used photographic processes and has explored the use of new grounds for painting and printmaking, particularly in the production of silkscreens and in the invention of new techniques to print on hardwood floors, glass, and verre eglomise. Since the early 2010s, she has devoted her time to photo-based art, specializing in alternative-process printmaking with precious metals such as gold, platinum, and palladium. Moroni has pioneered new techniques for printing gold, palladium, and platinum directly on gold and palladium leaf, a delicate and painstaking process that produces unique, luminescent, richly textured images reminiscent of both Italian Renaissance miniatures and Eastern Orthodox icon paintings and deeply rooted in the artist’s own personal history.

Moroni’s work has been shown in solo shows and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe since the 1990s. She is represented by L’Affiche Gallery in Milan and by Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York. She is based in New York and Italy.

Moroni also runs the Foundation Museum of the Palazzo Moroni in Bergamo, Italy, which was commissioned and built in the 17th century by Francesco Moroni. The Foundation houses several works by the great late Renaissance painter Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520-1579), and is a testament to both the historic heritage of the Moroni family as well as the artistic and cultural life of Bergamo.