How Grotesques are worked on the Stucco.
The grotesque is a kind of free and humorous picture produced by the ancients for the decoration of vacant spaces in some position where only things placed high up are suitable. For this purpose they fashioned monsters deformed by a freak of nature or by the whim and fancy of the workers, who in these grotesque pictures make things outside of any rule, attaching to the finest thread a weight that it cannot support, to a horse legs of leaves, to a man the legs of a crane, and similar follies and nonsense without end.[[233]] He whose imagination ran the most oddly, was held to be the most able. Afterwards the grotesques were reduced to rule and for friezes and compartments had a most admirable effect. Similar works in stucco were mingled with the painting. So generally was this usage adopted that in Rome and in every place where the Romans settled there is some vestige of it still preserved. And truly, when touched with gold and modelled in stucco such works are gay and delightful to behold.
They are executed in four different ways.[[234]] One is to work in stucco alone: another to make only the ornaments of stucco and paint groups in the spaces thus formed and grotesques on the friezes: the third to make the figures partly in stucco, and partly painted in black and white so as to imitate cameos and other stones. Many examples of this kind of grotesque and stucco work have been, and still are seen, done by the moderns, who with consummate grace and beauty have ornamented the most notable buildings of all Italy, so that the ancients are left far behind. Finally the last method is to work upon stucco with water colour, leaving the stucco itself for the lights, and shading the rest with various colours. Of all these kinds of work, all of which offer a good resistance to time, antique examples are seen in numberless places in Rome, and at Pozzuoli near to Naples. This last sort can also be excellently worked in fresco with opaque colours, leaving the stucco white for the background.[[235]] And truly all these works possess wonderful beauty and grace. Among them are introduced landscape views, which much enliven them, as do also little coloured compositions of figures on a small scale. There are to-day many masters in Italy who make this sort of work their profession, and really excel in it.
CHAPTER XIV. (XXVIII.)
Of the manner of applying Gold on a Bolus,[[236]] or with a Mordant,[[237]]
and other methods.
§ 93. Methods of Gilding.
FRESCO FROM RAFFAEL’S LOGGIE IN THE VATICAN.
It was truly a most beautiful secret and an ingenious investigation—that discovery of the method of beating gold into such thin leaves, that for every thousand pieces beaten to the size of the eighth of a braccio in every direction, the cost, counting the labour and the gold, was not more than the value of six scudi.[[238]] Nor was it in any way less ingenious to discover the method of spreading the gold over the gesso in such a manner that the wood and other material hidden beneath it should appear a mass of gold. This is how it is done. The wood is covered with the thinnest gesso kneaded with size weak rather than strong, and coarser gesso is laid on in several coats according as the wood has been well or badly prepared. When the gesso is scraped and smoothed, white of egg beaten carefully in water is mixed with Armenian bole, which has been reduced with water to the finest paste. The first coat of this is made watery, I mean to say liquid and clear, and the next thicker. This is laid on to the panel at least three times, until it takes it well all over, then with a brush the worker gradually wets with pure water the parts where the Armenian bole has been applied and there he puts on the gold leaf, which quickly sticks to that soft substance;[[239]] and when partially but not entirely dry he burnishes it with a dog’s tooth or the tooth of a wolf in order to make it become lustrous and beautiful.[[240]]