Note 182 — Chapter VI · (XIII.)

Plaster, or stucco, is sometimes regarded as an inferior material only to be used when nothing better can be obtained. It should not however be judged from the achievements of the domestic plasterer of to-day, who has to trust sometimes to the wall-paper to keep his stuff from crumbling away. Plaster as used by the ancients, and through a good part of the mediaeval and Renaissance periods up to the eighteenth century, is a fine material, susceptible of very varied and effective artistic treatment. It was made by the Greeks of so exquisite a quality that it was equivalent to an artificial marble. It could be polished, so Vitruvius tells us, till it would reflect the beholder’s face as in a mirror, and he describes how the Roman connoisseurs of his time would actually cut out plain panels of Greek stucco from old walls and frame them into the plaster work of their own rooms, just as if they were slabs of precious marble. (De Architectura, VII, iii, 10.) Vitruvius prescribes no fewer than six successive coats of plaster for a wall, each laid on before the last is dry, the last coat being of white lime and finely powdered marble.

By the Villa Farnesina at Rome some Roman, or more probably Greek, plaster decoration was discovered a few years ago that surpassed any work of the kind elsewhere known. We find there the moulded or stamped ornament Vasari describes, as well as figure compositions modelled by hand, while the plain surfaces are in themselves a delight to the artistic eye.

Among the best and best known stucco work, in figures and ornaments, of the later Italian Renaissance, may be ranked that at Fontainebleau by Primaticcio and other artists from the peninsula who were invited thither by François I, for the decoration of the ‘Galerie François I’ and the ‘Escalier du Roi.’