Who Initially Revived And Rediscovered Venetian Plaster?

A beautiful aspect of a rediscovered technique or an old design philosophy becoming popular again is that there is the beauty of discovering something new without the teething troubles that can sometimes come with novelty.

There are literally thousands of years of refinement and development of techniques to make perfect polished plaster walls with a wide range of beautiful, natural-looking finishes, but it looks new, truly beautiful, ornate and in some more ambitious designs outright impossible.

The promise of a type of marble that is easy to shape and use has been tantalising modern architects and interior designers since the pioneering works of Carlo Scarpa in the 1950s, but before his hugely influential forward-thinking projects was the work of another Venetian architect who might have been even more crucial.

The Man Who Made Plaster Venetian

Marmoratum Opus is the Roman term for what we call Venetian plaster, and roughly translates to “smooth marble”. This indicates that as early as De Architectura,  Vitruvius’ ten books on architecture, Venetian plaster was used for the very same reasons we use today.

However, much like flexible glass, the secrets of Roman concrete and countless other innovations and inventions died with the fall of the western part of the Roman Empire in 476 AD.

By the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the end of the last remnants of the Roman Empire in the East, so much of that old society had been lost, left to fade into ruins over a millennium old.

However, by this point, Italy had become the epicentre of a revival in interest in the works and deeds of the past, which had become a cultural movement known as the Renaissance.

Amidst this period where a fascination with history manifested as a whole new world, Andrea di Pietro della Gondola was born in Padua, then part of the Republic of Venice and now part of the region of Venetia.

More commonly known as Andrea Palladio, the young stonemason did not initially show the promise of someone who would transform architecture as we know it today. That changed in 1539 when he began to adopt many of the principles of Vitruvius into his own work.

As he was inspired so much by the polished marble of Roman architecture, Mr Palladio would extensively use a process he called “Pietra D’Istria”, named after a Peninsula in North East Italy that is now part of Italy, Slovenia and Croatia.

His technique used an initial coarse plaster layer (arricio), with a blend of lime putty, powdered marble and pigmentation to create bright, polished, smooth results in the end.

Much of his influence can be seen not only in the Renaissance-era buildings he worked on but also in the exceptionally influential 1570 book The Four Books of Architecture, which inspired an entire architectural movement that spread across Europe and even managed to reach North America before the end of the 18th century.

Whilst its wide usage began to fade by the 17th century due to changing trends in the Baroque period and attitudes to neoclassical architecture in general, it would make a huge comeback in the 20th century and has once again surged in popularity in the 2020s.

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