Stucco Decoration in Pre-Augustan Italy

Abstract

Fifty years ago, when Miss E. L. Wadsworth (Mrs. H. F. Cleland) wrote her monograph on Roman stucco reliefs, still the basic study of the subject, the earliest decorations that she examined in detail were those of a house discovered in the grounds of the Villa Farnesina in Rome. These stuccoes, which have been dated (with a precision perhaps unduly optimistic) to 19 B.C., are generally acknowledged to be among the masterpieces of their medium. From the vaults of three small cubicula come a large number of fragments showing a system of long borders and interlocking rectilinear panels, all framed by shallow mouldings and containing reliefs of great delicacy, of which the most important are landscapes, Dionysiac scenes, Victories, busts, grotesques and floral motifs (cf. Fig. 7, p. 52 and Plates I, a; II, a and b). Unpublished pieces of stucco-work from other vaults in the house repeat the same formula; and all attest the presence of artists of consummate skill and of an art-form which is technically perfect.Such work represents the culmination of a development, rather than its beginning. Miss Wadsworth was of course aware of this: indeed, she knew of at least one earlier set of decorations, the stuccoes of the Casa dei Grifi on the Palatine, and was only prevented from treating them in full by the fact that they were awaiting a definitive publication. But the general paucity of earlier material forced her to give short shrift to Republican stucco-work and to consign its origins to the realm of conjecture. She suggested that stucco reliefs first appeared in Italy at the time of Sulla, that they originated in Alexandria, and that they were introduced by way of Campania.