Review: Decorative Plasterwork in Ireland and Europe: Ornament and the Early Modern Interior, by Christine Casey and Conor Lucey, eds.

Abstract

Christine Casey and Conor Lucey, eds. Decorative Plasterwork in Ireland and Europe: Ornament and the Early Modern Interior London: Four Courts Press, 2012, 266 pp., 32 color and 120 b/w illus. $70 (cloth), ISBN 9781846823213 In a 1977 JSAH review, Robert Raley praised Geoffrey Beard’s Decorative Plasterwork in Great Britain as “another contribution to the slowly building storehouse of literature concerning the important, but generally neglected, field of the builder’s art.”1 Yet the perceived necessity of a 2010 reprint of the volume, which would itself be lauded with the claim that “for those who are looking for a historic resource on the makers and styles of British plasterwork, look no further,” demonstrates the glacial speed at which this storehouse of literature is being filled.2 Despite a sizable proliferation of scholarship on eighteenth-century architecture and, especially, interiors, studies focusing on decorative plasterwork have continued to lag behind.3 Even while cheekily asking the question “Is stucco just the icing on the cake?” in the keynote with which Alastair Laing addressed the 2010 conference at Trinity College, Dublin, from which this edited collection has been formed, the contributors to this beautiful volume resolutely answer no. Coeditor Conor Lucey’s introduction frames the volume’s thirteen essays stemming from that conference and explains that “the purpose … was three fold: to investigate the currency of a shared decorative language across eighteenth-century Europe; to consider the Irish stuccoed interior, arguably the apogee of visual culture in this island during the Georgian era, within its broader continental contexts; and to reflect on the current state of scholarship within the field” (21). Lucey offers his hypothesis on what he terms “the problem” of the historiography of architectural decoration writ large (29). Here he focuses on its in-between status as both sculpture and craft. Lucey points out that the recent “revival of academic interest in craftsmanship as cultural practice” brings a greater currency to the study of decorative plasterwork than had more traditional theorizations of the study of the history of art …