As a building and decorating material, polished plaster has a long history of being discovered and rediscovered, always leading to phenomenal results whenever it is applied by experts to add a beautiful touch to buildings.
The most recent rediscovery of the craft, and part of the reason why it is also known as Venetian plaster is due to the work of Carlo Scarpa, a pioneering architect from Venice who revived many historic plastering and construction techniques from the 1950s until his untimely death in 1978.
His works evoke the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, another revivalist famed for his reintroduction of ancient construction techniques, with polished plaster a particular favourite of his under the name “Pietra d’Istria”.
Mr Palladio specifically cited the Ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, writer of the Ten Books Of Architecture that preserved and catalogued the design and architectural techniques of the Roman Empire, including what he described as “Marmoratum Opus”.
Because of this connecting chain, as well as so much surviving evidence of Roman plasterwork, there is an assumption that the Romans either perfected polished plaster techniques or even invented them entirely.
This is not quite the case, although the history of polished plaster before Ancient Rome is far trickier.
Techniques Of The Greeks
Due to the cultural and technological amalgamation between Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece, it can sometimes be difficult to determine which techniques were taken wholesale from the Greeks when Rome conquered Macedonia following the Battle of Actium, and which were invented in parallel.
The Ancient Greeks did have access to much of the knowledge that the Romans did when it came to techniques for developing slaked lime, lime putty and how that could be used for creating beautiful, adhesive, smooth plaster.
However, whether or not they created the marble-effect designs usually associated with Marmorino and Venetian plaster is a matter of debate. The Greeks tended to paint plaster walls instead of trying to replicate the look of marble, although this varied considerably depending on region and class.
It largely depends on the definition of polished plaster one chooses to use, and given that there is evidence that waste marble dust was used in plaster believed to have been used in Greek architecture, there is a chance that a technique resembling modern Venetian plaster could pre-date Ancient Rome by a significant margin.
The Plaster Of The Pharaohs
Plaster of some kind has been used for nearly 10,000 years, but there is a lot of evidence that it was extensively used in Ancient Egypt, with some remarkable surviving examples of Egyptian plasterwork found in tombs and the Great Pyramids of Giza.
A lot of the greatest works of Ancient Egypt use polished plaster, typically as a base for carvings, paintings or the elaborate sarcophagus lids, which are otherwise made from stone.
Given that it was used as a stucco-style replacement or repair material for natural stone, there is a chance that the techniques associated with Ancient Rome might predate it by thousands of years, although to what extent will likely remain speculative unless new discoveries are found revealing Venetian plaster in a near-modern form was developed on the Nile.