The most fashionable look for many modern home designs is polished plaster, with a finish that manages to look like beautiful natural marble but with the versatility, robustness and usability of conventional lime plaster.
However, whilst the finish and look are incredibly modern and provide a style that fits a lot of interior design trends, particularly those that borrow from Industrial, Neo-Industrial and Art Deco styles from the past, the actual production process is extremely old and well-established.
The first-ever book on architecture, Vitruvius’ De Architectura, has a section all about polished plaster, with an entire chapter dedicated to the right marble to use within it. Roman plasterwork had a remarkable longevity, with results that would be impossible for thousands of years.
This begs a somewhat logical question, however; if Venetian plaster has been around for many thousands of years, why was it not widely used until recently?
The Fall And Rise Of Venetian Plaster
Venetian plaster was widely used in the Roman Empire from at least the third century BC when Pompeii became part of what was then the Roman Republic and was refined and universally used throughout the Empire up until and indeed after the end of it.
The fall of the Roman Empire was a dramatic cultural and technological shift, and the Barbarian kingdoms that took over their land had little interest in the architecture of Ancient Rome nor the techniques used to create such long-lasting buildings and materials.
The end of the era of Antiquity and the dawn of the Middle Ages was one characterised by the end of urban societies and a significant population decline, and alongside this was a loss in a lot of the knowledge of how the Romans maintained much of their infrastructure.
Whilst the most immediately obvious consequence of this was the end of the aqueduct system, one of the biggest losses from a modern perspective was the techniques used to mix lime plaster with the effectiveness and beauty the Romans did.
For comparison’s sake, whilst many of the domes in Rome itself used a mix of concrete and polished plaster to create almost impossibly beautiful sculpted domes, just a century later the Mausoleum of Theodoric used a single large stone instead.
Once Rome fell, its language became simpler and very different to the written language of centuries past, often restricted to ecclesiastical use without interest in the other aspects of Roman culture.
This did not change until the Fall of Constantinople, the final end of the Roman Empire of the East, by then known as the Byzantine Empire.
Around this time in Italy, many older Roman texts had been rediscovered, reprinted and translated into Italian and later English.
The architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) was the biggest spearhead of the revival of Venetian plaster, publishing The Four Books of Architecture and being heavily inspired by many of the lost arts of Roman construction.
Eventually, this fell out of style by the Baroque Period, but was revived again in the 1950s and more recently in the 21st century.
