Plastic Approaches to Roman Design: (Im)perceptible Mediations in Plaster Wall Reliefs

This essay traces how plastic designs became integrated on the walls of Roman homes over time in two modes: first style wall reliefs and fourth style ‘meta-friezes.’ The discipline of art history has tended to look past or through plaster reliefs (henceforth stucco), either as mere imitations of stone or pictorial illusions, obscuring crucial dimensions of late republican to early imperial period stucco applications. By attending to the medial affordances of pre-modern plaster – like its malleability, opacity, and speed – stucco is shown to be a complex remedial technique, integrated within three-dimensional decorative environments. Consideration of stucco reliefs as plastic mediators thus reveals synchronous and asynchronous developments of Roman design, while correcting for enduring biases in the history of art.