Tratteggio

In art restoration, the contemporary School of Rome scientific method of restoring ancient frescoes. The missing parts are filled, smoothed and then touched up (a reversible procedure) by means of watercolor applied with vertical brushstrokes giving a harmonized visual effect from afar but visible to the naked eye from close to. More recently and for Augustan-period paintings whose surface is burnished, watercolor is applied in a myriad of pinpoint dots, a sort of very closely-knit "pointill?". (Much of the preceding information verbally reported by Ms. Alix Barbet to George Ortiz in 1993, used in Ortiz's definition of tratteggio, quoted here from the George Ortiz Collection.)