Estratto dal volume speciale Lo stucco nell’età della Maniera: cantieri, maestranze, modelli (2022)

Stucco has never fitted comfortably into traditional art–historical discourses, usually structured around architecture, painting and sculpture. This paper addresses the novel rôle of stucco in 1500s ensembles that combined many different types of media, trimming down the borders between them; the critical and historical concepts of such syntheses is discussed. Beginning with Raphael and Bramante in Rome, artists used stucco to create total, integrated environments encompassing vaults, revetments, architectural decoration, reliefs, and sculptural figures. These went on as important models into the following century. It is a long–standing maxim that the Italian Renaissance was a rare historical era that produced important, novel architecture that was not a product of technical innovation. Instead, the renaissance of stucco was indeed such an innovation; this paper sees stucco as a mutable, changeable material, and an engine of technical innovation that enabled advances in Renaissance art and architecture, and the Renaissance incarnation of the total work of art.