44 
HOUSE & GARDEN 
An Ancient Italian Art Suitable for American Home Decoration 
I N the days when 
Boccaccio sang 
his lays for their 
pleasure, guests in 
the home of an 
Italian nobleman 
were wont to be en- 
The guest book has tertained in rooms 
gold and polychrome whose furnishings 
graffito decorations displayed the high¬ 
est artistic taste of 
the time. Not alone were the walls of the 
palace rooms ornamented in delightful 
color, but the furniture as well received 
decorations of a kind that required great 
skill and technical knowledge. 
Thence it came about that the ancient 
city of Siena was widely known for the 
beauty of its palaces and public buildings. 
Its artists were given constant occupation 
filling the commissions for the enrichment 
of furniture, ornamenting tables, chairs, 
candlelabra and hundreds of other objects, 
as well as those richly 
executed marriage 
chests now so well 
known in museums. 
Ti-ie Art Today 
skill of the early 
Monkish masters 
who developed this 
decorative craft. 
The type of dec¬ 
oration known in 
Italian as graffito 
(scratched), and Reverse of guest 
which forms the book. A splendid gift 
bulk of this Sien- f° r the house, $9 
ese work, deserves 
some explanation. In its early sense, we 
are told, it referred to the first free-hand 
drawing of the design on the surface of a 
board especially prepared to receive further 
elaboration of the work. This sketch was 
literally scratched on the surface of the pre¬ 
pared board by means of a sharpened point. 
Hence graffito came to be the term used to 
describe this particular decorative design. 
The preparation of the work was simple 
enough, the tool being merely the sharpened 
point of a brush handle with which the 
trained draughtsman 
freely developed the de¬ 
tails of his theme. 
The raised portions of 
the pattern were then 
built up with prepared 
glue (rabbit glue was 
the substance employed 
by the old Italian mas¬ 
ters), and this was com¬ 
bined with the symbolic 
paintings in tempera. 
The graffito was made in 
graceful patterns that 
enriched the garments 
of the saints, the halos 
about their heads and 
the architectural settings 
in which these revered 
persons were placed. 
What would have been 
otherwise a mass of flat 
gold thus became, with 
the aid of lines and with 
the raised and indented 
patterns placed upon it, 
a shimmering rich 
setting greatly enhanc¬ 
ing the delicately painted 
faces. Sano di Petro, 
Ambrogio Loren- 
zetti, Simone Martini 
and other Italian paint¬ 
ers understood very well 
the use of this delicate 
art, and it was constant¬ 
ly employed by their as¬ 
sistants in the wide 
borders surrounding the 
mural paintings they 
were called upon to ex¬ 
ecute in praise of their 
mother-city Siena. 
Tempera Painting 
Graffito with tempera 
painting was early em¬ 
ployed to decorate the 
stout wooden corners 
made to protect civic 
records in the time when 
Between that day and 
the present stretches the 
great gulf of five hun¬ 
dred years, but it has 
been bridged by a re¬ 
vival. Taking these 
ancient copies as models 
for his work a Sienese 
artist of our time, Sig¬ 
nor C. Scapecchi, has 
revived not only all the 
technical processes em¬ 
ployed in the highly 
decorative art of the 
14th and 15th Centuries 
in Italy, but likewise the 
very spirit of the art. 
It was in Siena that 
he learned from his 
master, while assisting 
him in the work of dec¬ 
orating the walls of a 
public building, all the 
secrets of the art of the 
“Primatifs,” revived for 
modern use from old 
records and recipes for 
application t o modern 
walls and furniture in 
the fashion followed 
during earlier times. 
This notable revival 
in modern Siena of the 
Primitive art has met 
with success in practical 
use. The walls of pub¬ 
lic buildings and palaces 
there are again receiving 
decorations in tempera 
and graffito, as they 
were treated in earlier 
times. Moreover the art 
of illumination on vel¬ 
lum is once more being 
practised with all the 
Design for lith Century cabi¬ 
net after the Italian manner. 
Graffito decorations are used 
over all 
The two little panels to right 
and left are doors for the writ¬ 
ing desk below, painted in 
tempera 
The rare beauty of this Gothic desk and chair lies in the heavy graffito ornamenta¬ 
tions which have been done in polychrome and gold 
