Stucco ‘Grotesques.’
[§ 92, Grotesques or fanciful devices painted or modelled on walls, ante, p. 244.]
Vasari touches on the subject of plaster work in all three ‘Introductions,’ to Architecture (§ 29), to Sculpture (§ 73) and to Painting (§ 92). In the former passages he deals with the material itself and with what may be called its utilitarian employment; in the last he has in view the artistic forms into which the material can be moulded, and which he calls by the curious name ‘grotesques.’ What these ‘grotesques’ are will presently be seen, but it is worth while first casting a glance back on the artistic use of plaster in its historical aspects.
It is not a little remarkable that although all the great ancient nations were familiar with this material, it was not till the late Greek and Greco-Roman periods that any general use was made of it as an independent vehicle of artistic effect. The Egyptians coated their walls with plaster of exquisite quality, which they brought to a fine, almost a polished, surface for their tempera paintings. The inhabitants of Mesopotamia protected their mud-brick walls with thin coats of lime plaster, sometimes only about a quarter of an inch in thickness but perfect in durability and weather-resisting properties. The Phoenicians at Carthage plastered the interior walls of their tombs, and the expression ‘whited sepulchres’ shows that Jewish tombs were coated in the same fashion. All through the historical period of Greek art plaster was at the command of the architect, to cover, and fill up inequalities in, the rough stone of which so many of the Hellenic temples were built, and fragments of the pre-Persian buildings of the Athenian Acropolis, still preserved on the rock, show how finely finished and how adhesive was this stucco film. So far as we know however none of the peoples just named seem to have modelled in the material, or used it for any of the decorative purposes for which the Greeks at any rate employed so largely the material of burnt clay. The exception is in the case of the older Aegean peoples, for the Cretans of Knossos made, as all the world now knows, a most effective artistic use of modelled stucco. This Aegean work may be connected technically with Egypt, for in the latest Egyptian period a considerable use was made of modelled plaster for sepulchral purposes, in the form of mummy-cases in which the features of the deceased, with headdress, jewels, etc., were represented in this material. The technique may go back in Egypt to the remoter times and may have been carried thence to the Aegean lands. The process however was apparently not inherited by the historical Greeks, who did not begin to use plaster freely and artistically till the later Hellenistic or Greco-Roman period.
Some late Greek private houses of the second or first century B.C., on Delos, show a beginning of modelled plaster work in the form of drafted ashlar stones imitated in the material, and it may be conjectured that the technique was developed at Alexandria, for the earliest existing mature works in the style, the famous stucco reliefs and mouldings found near the Villa Farnesina at Rome, resemble in many respects the so-called ‘Hellenistic’ reliefs, with landscape motives, that are ascribed to the school of Alexandria. In these stuccoes, now preserved in the Terme Museum at Rome, there are bands of enrichment stamped with wooden moulds, after the fashion described by Vasari in the ‘Introduction’ to Sculpture, § 73, that enclose fields wherein figure compositions with landscape adjuncts, or single figures, have been modelled by hand. Many of these last are of great beauty of form, and the whole have been executed with the lightest but firmest touch and the most delightful freedom. Some ceiling decorations in two tombs on the Via Latina, of the second century A.D., are almost as good in execution, and are interesting as giving in typical form ancient models that have been much copied at the Renaissance and in more modern times.
Early Christian artists, both in the West and in the East kept up the artistic use of stamped or modelled stucco. The Arabs inherited the technique, and at Cairo, and in the East and in Spain, they made a very extensive and tasteful use of the tractable material in their own style of artistic decoration. This style, like that of Byzantium, from which in great part it was derived; and that of the familiar Indian work in the exquisite marble-dust plaster or chunam, is chiefly surface decoration, without much plastic feeling, and relying mainly on geometrical, or at any rate inorganic, motives and forms. Bold modelling of forms accentuated by light and shade, as we are kindly informed by Dr James Burgess, does occur in old Buddhist work in northern India, and some excellent examples have recently been published in Ancient Khotan (Chinese Turkistan) Oxford, 1907, vol. I, p. 587 and pl. liii ff. The work however belongs essentially to the West rather than to the East, and the middle ages in Western Europe produced some remarkable works in this style. There is some modelled stuccowork of early date in the Baptistry at Ravenna, but the most interesting examples of the period in Italy are the large figures of saints and the archivolt enriched with very bold and effective vine scrolls, that are to be seen in the interior of the little oratory of S. Maria in Valle (or Peltrude’s chapel) at Cividale in Friuli. These very remarkable works, with which may be connected the stuccoes of the altar ciborium at S. Ambrogio, Milan, date about 1100, and may be paralleled by similar figures, equally plastic in treatment, and of about the same period, north of the Alps, in St. Michael’s at Hildesheim. Signor Cattaneo calls the Cividale work ‘Byzantine,’ but life-sized plastically-treated figures in high relief represent a form of decorative art that was not practised at Byzantium, and the work, like a good deal else that is too lightly dubbed ‘Byzantine,’ is no doubt of western origin, and is a proof that the tradition of modelling in plaster was handed down without a break through the mediaeval period.
At the Renaissance the tradition was revived, and this style of decoration was developed in Tuscany and North Italy, while one of its most conspicuous triumphs was the adornment by Italian artists in the first half of the sixteenth century of the Galerie François Premier and Escalier du Roi at Fontainebleau in France. It spread also to our own country, where artists of the Italian school carried out work in the same thoroughly plastic style in the now destroyed palace of Nonsuch, under the patronage of Henry VIII.
This is not however the style that Vasari has in view when he speaks of ‘stucco grotesques.’ What he means is an imitation of ancient stamped and modelled plaster decoration, of the type of that represented in the tombs on the Via Latina just referred to. Here the scale is small, though the work may cover large spaces, and the design is on the whole of a light and fanciful kind. The impulse to it dates from the early years of the sixteenth century when considerable discoveries were made at Rome, in the Baths of Titus and elsewhere, of antique apartments or sepulchral chambers decorated in this fashion. As these interiors, when discovered, were all underground they were called ‘caves’ or ‘grottoes,’ and for this reason, as Benvenuto Cellini informs us in the 6th chapter of his Autobiography, the decoration characteristic of them was called ‘grotesque.’ The fact that the designs were so commonly of the fantastic or so-called ‘Pompeian’ order has given to the word ‘grotesque’ its modern meaning of bizarre or semi-ludicrous.
According to Vasari, the painter Morto da Feltro (c. 1474–c. 1519) was the first to study these antique decorations. ‘Our first thanks and commendations’ he says (Opere, ed. Milanesi, V, 205 f.) ‘are due to Morto, who was the first to discover and restore the kind of painting called “arabesques” and “grotesques,” seeing that they were for the most part hidden among the subterraneous portions of the ruins of Rome, whence he brought them, devoting all his study to this branch of art.’ He spent many months also, Vasari tells us, at Tivoli among the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa, and made a journey to Pozzuoli near Naples, all on the same quest. Stucco reliefs in this revived antique style were used at the beginning of the sixteenth century by Pinturicchio in the Appartamenti Borgia in the Vatican, and from that time onwards they become exceedingly common.